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Canada has nothing on this city when it comes to lightning.

Shocking Find: Central Africa is the lightning 'capital' of the world


Scott Sutherland
Meteorologist/Science Writer

Sunday, April 5, 2015, 11:32 AM - Think where you live gets a lot of lightning? Now, thanks to a new map from NASA's Earth Observatory, you can compare your region to others, to see who comes out on top. However, unless you live in a very specific area of Central Africa, you're going to come in at least second in this contest.

Using data collected from two orbiting satellite sensors - the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) on NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite and the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) on the OrbView-1/Microlab satellite - NASA has put together a map of lightning strikes across the Earth, plotted by rate (number per square kilometre, per year).

The result was this:


Global lightning activity. Credit: Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory

Some regions stand out, like near Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo, along Lake Taha, in northwestern Ethiopia, throughout northwestern Colombia and most of central Africa.

However, for shear concentration of strikes, nowhere comes close to what a swath of land in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo sees. Stretching between Maiko National Park and the the Itombwe National Reserve, near the borders of Rwanda and Burundi, this region shows up like a beacon, with each square kilometre receiving around 100 lightning strikes every year.

Given that the entire region represents roughly 100,000 square kilometres, that's more than 10 million lightning strikes per year, concentrated in a very small part of the planet!

By comparison, the entire country of Canada - all 10 million square kilometres of it - apparently only sees a little over 2 million lightning strikes per year.

Zoom in closer and The two most concentrated areas, each about 100 kms on a side, are located at the northern and southern ends of that bright swath, just to the east of both Maiko and Itombwe. These two, each, receive around 15,000 strikes per year. An equivalent area in Canada - from Toronto to Hamilton, including all adjacent townships - would have to receive over 50 strikes each and every day, from April 1 to October 31, to match it.

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

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