Living where we do, surrounded by forests, we worry a lot about forest fires, especially now since climate change is making itself so obvious. One of the major causes of forest fires is lightning. Way back when I was working for the Forest Service, technology was beginning to be developed that showed almost immediately where lightning was striking.
I figured that surely after all these years, there must be some apps developed that made this technology available to everyone, so I checked, an sure enough there are a lot of them out there. I downloaded one called “Lightning Tracker” and it is sure nice, when there is a thunderstorm to immediately see where the lightning is hitting.
Above is a screen shot I took on Sunday evening after a thunderstorm. The blue circle is where our house is located and all the red dots are recent lightning strikes, the yellow dots are older hits. I was pretty shocked to see how close and how many strikes there were. Luckily most occurred up in treeless alpine areas, and the strikes were accompanied with rain, so they didn’t cause any forest fires as far as I know.
View my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
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