Boston: India’s monsoon season began with an extraordinary outburst of lightening Wednesday, as almost 37,000 bolts flashed across the sky or slammed into the ground in just 13 hours, according to meteorological instrument maker Vaisala Inc.
Lightening from powerful spring storms that wash across India and neighbouring Bangladesh pose a great risk to farmers, said Ron Holle, a Vaisala meteorologist at the company’s lightning centre in Tucson, Arizona. The most dangerous storms come in May.
Vaisala’s network tracks about 2 million strikes around the globe each day and about 2 billion annually, Holle said. Other hot spots for lightening include the southern and central US, the northern coast of Australia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Columbia, Sumatra, Malaysia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bloomberg