As if the issues associated with climate change couldn’t get any worse, it has now been reported by USA TODAY, there could be an increase in lightning strikes across the USA this century, reaching as high as a 50% increase due to the increasingly warm temperatures associated with climate change. The United States can expect an increase in injuries and lightning associated deaths, the spread of wildfires and other environmental hazards if lightning strikes increase.

“With warming, thunderstorms become more explosive,” said David Romps, an assistant professor of earth and planetary science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and head author on the study of lightning strikes published last week.

According to the National Weather Service, typically in the United States alone a few hundred people are struck by lightning each year, resulting in roughly 50 fatalities from lightning strikes. With the projected number of lighting strikes  each year to rise from 20 million to 30 million, we can expect those numbers to rise.

In addition to the striking of people, the lighting will create more wildfires seeing as though half of the acreage burned from wildfires in the United States is sparked by lightning. Firefighters have admitted in the past lightning ignited fires are often the most arduous fires to fight off and extinguish.

The increase in lightning “has to do with water vapor, which is the fuel for explosive deep convection (thunderstorms) in the atmosphere,” Romps said. “Warming causes there to be more water vapor in the atmosphere, and if you have more fuel (water vapor) lying around, when you get ignition, it can go big time.”

By analyzing the lightning data of the last few years, scientists have constructed computer models to mimic the combination of additional precipitation and buoyant clouds in the atmosphere due to global warming and its effects on creating more lightning.