What made NASA put up a specialized science camera to track lightning? It is attached to the International Space Station which circles the earth 16 times every day.
This NASA instrument has been cataloguing lightning strikes in the atmosphere since 2017. It is the second LIS to be launched after the first flew on NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite from 1997-2015. It is also the third dedicated lightning instrument NASA has put into space. The first was the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) on the OrbView-1 satellite, which circled Earth from 1995 to 2000.
They now can identify the locations on Earth where lightning strikes the most - known as the Lightning Capital of the World. It is now Lake Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela. At one time it was Lake Kivu on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Africa remains the leader in the number of lightning hotspots.
Lake Maracaibo's average flash rate is 389 per day. The Lake Kivu location had 368 flashes per day. But it can be thousands per night at its highest and about 300 nights per year, peaking in September.
And the reason why NASA tracks lightning? To better help forecasters predict and alert the public to severe weather such as thunderstorms, tornadoes and hurricanes.
Here are two images that made me think of lightning. Particularly the second one, found on the side of a dilapidated van.
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