Is it true that you see more lightning in summer?

* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
28 June 2023 Wednesday 16:51
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Is it true that you see more lightning in summer?

* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia

We have been in the new summer season for a few days and the images of lightning are already recurring in Las Fotos de los Lectores de La Vanguardia. And it is that this season of the year is conducive to electrical storms discharging excess energy from the sky on the earth's surface.

Yesterday afternoon lightning abounded among the rain and I was able to capture these three in the Remei neighborhood, Vic. It was at sunset and the sky was darkening, highlighting the lightning among the rain.

A rain that was generous in the last stage of spring and beginning of summer. It was sorely missing. The church of Remei rears its head in the center of the image, at the bottom.

Summer is a favorable time for lightning. To give us an idea, on August 17, 2003, neither more nor less than 60,201 were registered in a single day.

On very hot days, as has been experienced this week in Catalonia, it is not uncommon for spectacular cumuloninbus clouds to form, clouds of diurnal evolution and vertical development that are fed by updrafts of warm and humid air.

The electrical discharge can be cloud-Earth or Earth-cloud, depending on the initial direction of the lightning. It depends on the polarity, negative or positive, respectively, of the two ends of the ionized or electrically charged channel that establishes the connection. In any case, to our eyes, lightning strikes are quite a spectacle.