Science Snippets: More Thunderstorms in Our Warming World

Draft script:

As I have reported many times in this space, a warmer Earth is a wetter Earth. A warmer atmosphere causes increased evaporation. What goes up must come down, so the water in the atmosphere caused by evaporation comes down to Earth in the form of precipitation.

As you would expect, the precipitation is sometimes accompanied by lightning. As it turns out, this is especially evident at higher latitudes. The Yale School of the Environment weighs in on this topic in a report published 18 June 2025 with an article titled Lightning Strikes the Arctic: What Will It Mean for the Far North? The subtitle: “A warmer world is expected to bring more thunderstorms, especially at higher latitudes. Scientists are now reporting a dramatic surge in lightning in the Far North and are scrambling to parse how this could affect wildfires, the chemistry of the atmosphere, and Arctic ecosystems.”

The article from the Yale School of the Environment begins with a story from August 2019: “In August 2019, something bizarre happened in the Far North: A massive thunderstorm produced more than a thousand flashes of lightning, including a record-breaking bolt that hit just 32 miles from the North Pole, the closest strike ever recorded.” The first paragraph concludes with a line from a climatologist at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks: “It was a crazy summer.”

The article cites a peer-reviewed paper in setting up and then asking a question: “It’s common knowledge that thunderstorms and lightning are more likely when it’s hot than when it’s cold; they are more prevalent in the tropics than in the Arctic. So, scientists wondered: Was the Arctic becoming more electric in our warming world, and if so, what impacts would that have?”

The following two paragraphs provides an overview of the importance of the information in this article: “In general, a warmer world is expected to be a stormier world. But the precise impacts that climate change will have on thunderstorms and lightning remain a matter of scientific debate. Getting a handle on this is important for a host of reasons. Globally, tens of thousands of people die each year from lightning strikes. Lightning sparks chemical reactions in the atmosphere that can either exacerbate or counteract air pollution and climate change, with surprisingly powerful impacts on planet-warming methane. And, of course, lightning strikes are a significant cause of wildfires, which can devastate landscapes and release planet-warming carbon into the air.

So far, the detection networks that count lightning strikes around the world have seen only a vague hint of an upwards trend in total global lightning. But in the north, the story is different. In the Arctic, there has been a far more dramatic upsurge, with one report finding that north of the 80th parallel (passing through the top of Greenland), recorded lightning events went from around 100 per year in the early 2010s to more than 7,000 in 2021.”

A retired atmospheric physicist at the University of Washington in Seattle is then quoted: “the Arctic basically didn’t have lightning at all. Now it’s got a lot more. It’s easy to see that.”

The article from the Yale School of the Environment continues with information and questions most of us interested in climate change already know: “Researchers are now scrambling to get a better sense of how much lightning will increase in the north, and what that will mean for people, local ecosystems, and the global climate. Will more lightning spark more fires, or will more rain — also brought by climate change — dampen them? And is what’s happening in the north an aberration, or does it signal change across the rest of the planet?”

As you probably know, lightning strikes increase with increased temperature. A peer-reviewed paper in the renowned journal Science quantified the relationship between temperature and lighting strikes on 14 November 2024. Specifically, two scholars from the University of California-Berkeley and two other scholars from the State University of New York-Albany quantified this relationship. They found that strikes increase about 12% for every 1 C increase in global temperature. This estimate is based on two primary factors: precipitation and convective available potential energy, which is an indicator of air instability. More rainclouds and more convection produce more lightning.

But wait, there’s more. Recent research indicates that two other factors affect lightning. One is the abundance of graupel in clouds, as explained in a peer-reviewed paper in the renowned Nature series. Graupel is sometimes called snow pellets or soft hail because it is a form of precipitation that consists of small, white, opaque ice pellets. Graupel is a form of the German word Graupe, which means pearl barley. Graupel increases the electrical charge of clouds.

The second factor affecting lightning is air pollution. As you probably already know, COVID-19 led to a reduction in travel, which led to cleaner air. Cleaner air caused lightning rates to decline by about 15 percent. In 2022, changes to shipping pollution regulations similarly caused a huge reduction in lightning strikes over shipping lanes.

All this information can be a little confusing. Obviously, reducing air pollution is good. However, loss of aerosol masking can have profound impacts locally, regionally, and globally. We have much to learn about the interactions among air quality, global warming, lightning, and wildfires. Furthermore, we don’t have a complete understanding of wildfires and their impacts. Wildfires are an important part of ecosystem function, even as they destroy property. As usual, what we don’t know vastly overwhelms what we do know. The process of science, to the extent it is allowed to continue, will help clarify these important relationships and their impacts on our lives.