Summer heat and sizzling lightning facts

Our summer season in the Inland Northwest has started off to be cooler than normal. Our warmest day was Saturday as high temperatures approached the 90-degree mark in some areas, but cooled down once again on Sunday.

It looks like we’ll have some pleasant afternoon temperatures this week. Conditions should start to warm up to above-normal levels toward the end of next week. As Cliff and I have been saying, the late July and early August time frame should have very warm or hot temperatures in Coeur d’Alene and surrounding regions.

Although our recent weather has been mild to warm, readings to the south of our region are much hotter. Dangerous heat has been plaguing the southwestern portions of the country as temperatures in the desert regions have climbed to over 110 degrees. The long-range forecast models are predicting this oppressive heat will persist in this part of the country for at least the next several weeks.

The heat will expand this week across much of the central and southern U.S. Last week, the National Weather Service issued Excessive Heat Warnings for the inland area of Southern California, southern Nevada and the southern portion of Arizona. It’s very likely we’ll be hearing about record heat from the southwestern U.S. across the southern Great Plains and the Mississippi Valley. Readings could be as high as 115 degrees in Kansas, Oklahoma and northern Texas. There may be some spots that challenge the 120-degree mark.

Many of the all-time heat records in the central U.S. occurred during the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. This heatwave is expected to be intense, but not likely to break those records. However, with all the extreme weather we’ve seen, anything is possible.

With Pacific storms moving into the region, there have also been a number of days of thunderstorms. Last month, a new report was issued detailing the instances of lightning across the U.S. According to Vaisala’s U.S. National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN), there were more than 223 million lightning events recorded in the U.S. in 2019. That figure was 8 million more than lightning events in 2018. Across the globe, more than 2.35 billion instances of lightning were observed.

The U.S. state with the highest number of lightning events per square mile last year was Florida with 228. However, the state with the most total lightning events was Texas with a whopping 47.3 million. The second highest was Oklahoma with nearly 14.8 million. Kansas was third with 13.8 million and Illinois was sixth with 8.1 million. Iowa was 11th with a total of over 5.8 million lightning strikes. In Idaho, there were 635,686 lightning strikes in 2019, which ranked 37th in the country. Washington ranked 41st with 258,368 lightning strikes in 2019.

A typical bolt of lightning usually lasts for a few seconds. However, a report from the United Nations says that on March 4, 2019, there was a flash in Argentina that lasted for an amazing 16.73 seconds. That was an all-time record as the previous one was in southern France on Aug. 30, 2012, which lasted 7.74 seconds.

Last year was another record for “megaflashes,” or extreme bursts of lightning. Images showed that the flash extended for about 400 miles across southern Brazil on Oct. 31. That beat the record of 199.5 miles on June 20, 2007, across Oklahoma. The strike was captured by the American Geophysical Union and recorded by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites from space.

In 2019, there were 20 deaths in the U.S. from lightning strikes. So far in 2020, there have been five. Two of the people were working, one was getting out of a car and the other two were walking during a thunderstorm. Most of the incidents occurred in southern states.

Data from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) says that about one-third of lightning injuries occur indoors. This can happen to people who are around water, plugged-in electronic equipment such as computers or televisions, corded telephones and being near windows, doors and concrete.

According to Vaisala, lightning does play an important role for our planet. Lightning helps to fertilize the soil by producing nitrate nutrients. It may also be a possible mechanism for the origin of life.

There is a saying that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. In an open area, this may be true. However, tall buildings and trees have been struck multiple times as they stand out from the ground. In India, an active monsoon season resulted in more than 100 people killed by lightning in just two days in late June.

The odds of getting struck by lightning in the U.S. are about 1 in 700,000, according to National Geographic.

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Contact Randy Mann at randy@longrangeweather.com