Weather: yes, lightning can strike several times in the same place

Lightning can strike the same place several times, explained a team of scientists who conducted a census over several years in Spain and South America. Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon, explains to us that with the storm season beginning, we were able to observe this phenomenon quite suddenly, particularly two weeks ago in Île-de-France.

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Mathilde Fontez: Yes, lightning can strike the same place twice. In a sense, we already knew this, because what causes lightning is a cocktail of weather, geography and climate, a constant depending on the region. Lightning strikes more often in mountains, in humid and warm areas. A large census, carried out in 2021 using sensors installed on board the ISS and several satellites, had already provided a precise map of impacts on a global scale.

A quick tour of the world. Lhe world record is held by Lake Maracaibo, in Venezuela. It experiences 297 days of lightning per year. The most electric capital is Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with 179 lightning strikes per day, on average. The big hot spot in Europe is in the Alps, northeast of Italy. However, there is never lightning at the poles. But beyond these extreme cases, a team of Spanish and American specialists wanted to trace lightning impacts over years, to carefully analyze their recurrence.

Are there impacts always in the same place?