Climate change’s latest killer: Lightning strikes

For every person killed by lightning, about nine others are struck and survive, often with life-changing injuries. And with climate change bringing more stormy weather and lightning strikes more popularActivists like Daya believe the Indian government is failing to protect its people. “The bare minimum is to at least spread information about everything related to lightning at the local government level,” Daya said.

India has systems in place to predict dangerous storms. These systems work by collecting lots of accurate data, said Sanjay Srivastava, chairman of the Climate Resilience Observing Systems Promotion Council (CROPC), an intergovernmental body working to build resilience to the impacts of climate change. Srivastava is also the convenor of the Lightning Resilient India Campaign.

“Detecting the precise location of a cloud-to-ground lightning strike is a computational mechanism that requires at least three devices,” Srivastava said. These are radio frequency detectors, to detect the radio waves produced by lightning; a Doppler weather radar, to detect rainfall and wind patterns associated with storms that can produce lightning; and a lightning detector, a device specially designed to detect the electromagnetic signals produced by lightning.

As of April 2022, India’s National Remote Sensing Centre has installed 46 lightning-detecting sensors across the country. Another institute, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, has installed 83 sensors. These sensors, along with other personal and institutional data, monitor and guide India’s lightning warning system.

Data shows that Jharkhand and other nearby regions in eastern and central India are among the country’s hotspots, as this is where hot, dry air currents from the northwest meet moist air currents from the east. As clouds meet warmer air, the moist air rises until it reaches sub-zero temperatures in the upper atmosphere, where it can freeze into ice particles called graupel. When they collide with other ice particles, they create an electrostatic charge, which can eventually lead to lightning. Global temperature rise is increasing this phenomenon.

However, despite advances in meteorology, the full mechanisms behind the formation and behaviour of lightning remain largely a mystery. The exact triggers, the precise nature of how lightning propagates through the atmosphere and the factors that determine the intensity of each strike are not fully understood. The risks to human life can only be predicted in fairly broad terms.

And while these early warning systems do exist, their information often doesn’t reach people in a timely manner. That’s why volunteers like Shankar work to educate people about how to stay safe and teach them how to build easy-to-make lightning arrestors—devices that neutralize cloud-to-ground lightning.

The day Shankar visited the Manjhis, it was drizzling. On the way, he noticed farmers and locals taking shelter under trees. He stopped to inform them that standing under trees during the rain would increase the risk of being struck by lightning. But they said there was no other place where they could take shelter.

Lightning fatalities are more common in rural areas, where infrastructure is limited. Concrete houses, which can have a protective Faraday cage effect, are less prominent there than in cities, while tall vegetation, where workers can take shelter, can attract lightning strikes. Densely populated areas in storm zones also see more casualties. “We can say that there are two factors behind lightning casualties,” says Anand Shankar, who works at the India Meteorological Department in the Ministry of Earth Sciences in the state of Bihar (Anand and Daya are not related).