A line of thunderstorms flashes and rumbles over southeastern Kansas into Oklahoma and Missouri, sending clouds towering as much as eight and a half miles into the pre-dawn Easter darkness. More than three and a half miles above those tallest clouds, Greg Nelson guides his NASA ER-2 high altitude aircraft to and fro over the most active storm cells, looking for lightning. In UAH's SWIRLL building, a team of UAH students watch radar and satellite data, as well as forecast models, feeding up-to-the-minute “nowcast” weather information to NASA and NOAA scientists talking (indirectly) to Nelson to help him position each sweep so it takes him over storm clouds with the greatest amount of active lightning. The ER-2 — a converted U-2 spy plane — uses a sensor conceived, designed and built at UAH to look at lightning at the same time a new lightning instrument aboard GOES 16, a new weather satellite parked 22,236 miles above the equator, sees those same lightning flashes over the Great Plains. The main goal: By looking at lightning flashes over the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. during the next month, to confirm the new satellite sensor — the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) — is seeing and reporting the lightning flashes it should see and report, and that it has them in the right places on its map covering much of the western hemisphere. That's why it is important to first forecast and then "nowcast" where the lightning will be. "In mission mode, our job becomes to pick a spot, a lat long (latitude and longitude) the pilot can fly to," said Austin Clark, a master’s degree student at UAH and the team leader for the student forecasters. "In a lightning mission, the pilot's as good a nowcaster as we are. He can see the storms, but he'll check back with us before making any flight changes. "We have to file a flight plan before he takes off, but the flight plan is dynamic, and deviation is the norm." The student team — three graduate students, including Clark, and two undergrads, along with eight unpaid volunteers — has been at work with the ER-2 flights since early March, at first making forecasts for clear skies over Mexico, California and the Gulf of Mexico. To date, they have been some of the team's most difficult forecasting jobs. "The hardest thing for us has been forecasting clear skies," Clark said. "That's probably because no one usually cares about clear skies." Clear sky was needed to validate another new GOES 16 instrument, the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), which is five times faster and has higher resolution than the instrument it replaces on GOES 14 and 15. ABI is the satellite's primary instrument, watching the movement of clouds and water vapor across land and sea. Clear sky (ABI can see cirrus clouds too wispy and thin for human eyes to pick out) over visually uniform surfaces (the gulf, the Sonora desert in Mexico and the Mojave desert in California) gives the science team an opportunity to compare what ABI sees with what a similar instrument aboard the ER-2 sees over the same areas at the same times. "They want the satellite and the airplane to see the same things," Clark said. "But having to pinpoint stuff like that has been extremely difficult. It turns out the hardest weather to forecast is no weather at all." With the clear sky portion of the mission out of the way, the flights lasting until May 19 (when the ER-2 will fly from its temporary base at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia back to its home base at NASA's Armstrong Flight Center in California) will be hunting for lightning. "We built for the ER-2 a series of instruments to validate the GLM," said Hugh Christian, a principal research scientist at UAH and the leader of UAH's lightning research team. In addition to being one of the primary designers and scientists for GLM, Christian also led the development of the Fly's Eye GLM Simulator (FEGS), the lightning watching instrument carried aloft aboard the ER-2. "We want to get a variety of different types of measurements over different types of storms," Christian said. "But we also want to get flights over places where there is good ground instrumentation, so we can see how well the space-based measurements compare to the ground-based measurements that have been going on for several years." These ground-based lightning measurements come from several lightning mapping arrays: a network of instruments that use signals generated by lightning flashes — for example, high frequency radio signals — to track lightning as it passes through that area. There are two such permanent arrays in north Alabama, one organized by NASA and the other by UAH, listening to different parts of the lightning signal. That makes north Alabama a priority target for the ER-2 if a lightning-active storm passes over during the next month. There are other LMAs, ranging from Houston, Texas, to Wallops Island, Virginia, and from the U.S. half of Lake Ontario (the actual LMA is in Toronto, but that's Canadian air space) to the Kennedy Space Flight Center in Florida. The Lake Ontario, western New York and western Pennsylvania region within the Toronto LMA's territory is the target for an ER-2 flight on Thursday, April 20. "There are a number of these sites that we'll be going over on a preferential basis," Christian said. While the ER-2's principal mission is to validate and calibrate GLM, that won't stop scientists from using that same information to study storms and how they evolve. "The more information we get on a storm, the better we'll be able to understand the storm and the physics involved," Christian said. With the NSF-supported VORTEX Southeast severe weather research campaign camped in north Alabama for several more weeks, that makes storms in north Alabama an even higher priority for the ER-2. When a likely storm moves into north Alabama during VORTEX SE (such is expected to happen Saturday, April 22), scientists with a dizzying array of instruments from across the U.S. swing into action: The two local ground-based lightning mapping arrays (plus a temporary lightning interferometer here just for VSE), up to half a dozen research-grade Doppler radars, trucks and trailers laden with lasers and other instruments designed to probe and profile a the storm's structure as it passes overhead, dozens of weather balloons launched into the heart of the storm, several portable weather stations, and NOAA's P-3 Orion airplane, which uses its two Doppler radars and other instruments to look into the storm from the side and above. Add to that NASA's ER-2 and, perhaps, some GLM data to be named later (since the instrument isn't technically operational yet), and storms crossing north Alabama and the VORTEX-SE domain during the next month will keep few of their secrets. "It's the icing on the cake," said Larry Carey, chairman of UAH's Atmospheric Science Department. "We will be able to do a lot of science from this." Years before he ever thought about forecasting for instruments flying in airplanes on the edges of space (or at least above 90 percent of the atmosphere), Clark was a kid growing up in Ringgold, Georgia, just south of Chattanooga, watching the weather blow by. "On April 27, 2011, I saw the strongest tornado in the Georgia record, an EF-4," he recalled. "I watched it come down from the sky. I couldn't see it touch the ground, but I heard that about five minutes later it hit the town. "Of course, while I was watching all of this I was out on the front porch, which is the last place you're supposed to be in bad weather. But what good weather nerd isn't?"
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A bolt of lightning struck the spire of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, during a major thunderstorm in Dubai, in a stunning moment caught on camera. Reaching a total height of 829.8 meters (2,722ft), the tallest structure in the world towers over the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai, which was hit by a thunderstorm on Saturday.
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Perth has been treated to another lightning show, as parts of the state - including the northern and eastern parts of the metropolitan area - remain on a severe thunderstorm warning. The Bureau of Meteorology’s latest thunderstorm alert, issued at 2.55pm, advises of the potential for damaging winds, heavy rainfall, flash flooding and hailstones. The storms will continue into Sunday night. Locations that may be affected include Moora, Mount Magnet, Dalwallinu, Dowerin, Morawa, Paynes Find, Toodyay, Wongan Hills, Yalgoo and northern and eastern parts of Perth. The storms could cause damage to homes and property.
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A married couple out for an evening jog were killed when they were struck by lightning at a park in Jalan Kenari, Puchong Jaya, on Sunday (March 12) evening. The bodies of Yee Boon Koo, 59, and Madam Ooi Lee Chen, 57, were found lying face down on the jogging path, reported the New Straits Times (NST). Police said they were pronounced dead at the scene.
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A lot of electrical activity was recorded by the ZEUS lightning detection network, over the central Mediterranean on Tuesday, 7/3/2017. More than 4000 strikes lit up the skies, mainly from 07:00 to 23:00 UTC.
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OAA’s jack-of-all-trades satellite, GOES-16, keeps constant tabs of large portions of the Western Hemisphere from nearly 22,300 miles above the surface. Armed with the first lightning detector in a geostationary orbit, the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), GOES-16 can see the first signs of a storm becoming severe.
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According to Weatherzone, 16,750 lightning strikes occurred within a 50 kilometre radius of Gloucester on Saturday night (February 18). While most of the strikes occurred between clouds, 3,411 of them hit the ground. A NSW RFS spokesperson said most of the 200 fires started around the State over the weekend can be attributed to lightning. Lightning is believed be the cause of the fire at Mount Mooney Trail, Upper Bowman, which flared up on Saturday, February 18 and is currently being controlled. It began with an isolated fire in a tree and began to spread. The fire at Barnard/Giro continues to burn and currently being controlled as crew monitor the vast area with the firing having burnt over 14,500 hectares of land so far. It has a 60 kilometre edge with work still needing to be done before it is out. Fire came close to the Karamea Homestead in Curracabundi National Park but the property was saved. The fire at Howes Creek, Terrell near Wards River has burnt over 3,200 hectres and also continues to burn. Heavy rain has caused fire trucks to get bogged at some locations, while other fronts remain dry. The lightning caused multiple flare ups around the region, most of which were extinguish quickly with the help of fire crews and heavy rain. The NSW RFS are using aircrafts, designed for fire spotting, to patrol the region on the look out for any new fires. The RFS spokeperson explained that lightning strikes can cause fire within trees that continue to burn for several days without being detected.
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A backup copy of an imaging instrument that launched into space in 1997 is getting its chance to fly. The Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station on Saturday (Feb. 18) on the 10th SpaceX cargo resupply mission for the agency. If all goes according to plan, this imaging tool will be mounted on the exterior of the orbiting lab so it can capture real-time observations of lightning strikes on Earth, NASA officials said in a statement. This instrument that is headed to the station on Saturday was built as a backup to the original LIS instrument, which launched in 1997 aboard the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and collected lightning data for 17 years before being shut down. [Photos: Earth's Lightning Seen from Space] "The LIS used in this follow-on mission is an exact duplicate of the sensor used on TRMM," Richard Blakeslee, science lead for the LIS at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, said in a statement from the agency. "But it will sample lightning over a wider geographical area." The TRMM satellite orbited Earth between 35 degrees north latitude and 35 degrees south latitude, so the original LIS could observe only the planet's tropical regions. The space station, however, has a higher orbital inclination and therefore provides a vantage point that will allow the LIS to observe areas closer to the poles in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, NASA officials said. The LIS is scheduled for a two-year mission on the orbiting lab, during which time it will measure the "amount, rate and optical characteristics of lightning on Earth," NASA officials said in the statement. The imaging tool will also study the connection between lightning and other severe weather events, like convective storms and tornadoes. Mounting the LIS to the exterior of the space station allows for observations to be downloaded in real time and used to improve weather forecasts and storm preparedness around the globe. The data collected from the LIS will be used in conjunction with observations from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper — a weather instrument recently launched on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) GOES-16 satellite. "The space-based vantage point allows us to observe all forms of lightning over land and sea, 24 hours a day," Blakeslee said in the statement. "The orbit of the space station will allow LIS to look at lightning distributions over different times of the day, further enhancing our knowledge of the complicated dynamics of lightning."
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In parts of Venezuela, there are lightning storms almost 300 nights each year, producing skies so bright that navigators once used them as a lighthouse. So could lightning be used to power the planet instead of fossil fuels? Karl Kruszelnicki finds out. Last time I talked about how lightning actually comes into existence, and how it hits our planet about 44 times each second. So why don't we capture this awesome lightning power, and use it to run our industries and boil our kettles? Well, to answer that, the obvious place to is a lightning capital of the world: Lake Maracaibo in the state of Zulia in Venezuela. Venezuela is so far north in the continent of South America that it actually sits in the Northern Hemisphere, running from the Equator to about 10 degrees north. In Lake Maracaibo, lightning storms happen about 297 days of each year. That's over 80 per cent of the time. In fact, the locals have put a lightning bolt on the official state flag—to fit in better with the scenery. Now Lake Maracaibo is not actually a lake, because it is connected to the sea by the Tablazo Strait. This strait is over five kilometres wide where it meets the Gulf of Venezuela. This so-called 'lake' is about 200 kilometres across, and is a major shipping route for Venezuela's crude oil. But if the locals call it a lake, I'm happy to play along. So far, we've got the lake—which is not really a lake—in a part of South America, which is actually in the Northern Hemisphere. Lightning storms are so constant that they've earned the name 'the Never-Ending Storm of Catatumbo'. The name comes from the Catatumbo River that empties into Lake Maracaibo. The water is warm, and the atmosphere is very humid—after all, it's only 10 degrees from the Equator. But the mouth of the river is surrounded on three sides, like a horseshoe, by three mountain ranges. When the cold dry air from the mountains meets the hot and humid air, you've got the best possible conditions for lightning. The storm clouds build up to an altitude of over a kilometre. Within an hour of the storm clouds forming, the lightning starts flashing. The flash rate quickly accelerates up to 200 flashes per second. A typical lightning storm lasts for 10 hours, and this happens nearly 300 nights each year. The clouds are like an enormous light bulb, flashing in the sky. It's bright enough to read a newspaper in the middle of the night. The storms reach their peak in September, but according to the locals, the prettiest storms happen in November each year. These storms are so powerful and so regular that they have been used by European navigators for the last four centuries as a natural lighthouse. In fact, they're nicknamed 'Maracaibo's Lighthouse'. So we've come to the right place to develop the technology to capture and use lightning. But before we start thinking about lightning rods and enormous banks of tens of thousands of giant ultra-capacitors, let's take a look at what the scientists would call the numbers. Typically, each lightning bolt carries about 500 megajoules (MJ) of energy. What does that mean in plain English? First, 500 MJ is the amount of energy needed to run an average Western house for about a week. Second, 500 MJ is the amount of energy in about 38 litres of petrol or gasoline (or about 4.2 US gallons). And third, 500 MJ is enough energy to boil about 1,500 kettles of water. Suppose that we could capture all the energy from all the 1.4 billion lightning bolts that happen each year. In that case, we would have enough energy to make 100 cups of tea for each human on the planet, each year. That works out to a cuppa every three or four days. Now that's quite surprising. Before I did the numbers, my gut feeling wrongly told me that the energy from lightning could easily provide bulk energy for the whole world. Instead, all it would do is give you a few cups of tea each week. Even though lightning is very impressive, it's no match for the energy-hungry society that we humans have developed over the last few centuries. With no trouble at all, we can easily burn more than 38 litres of petrol in travelling from one Australian capital city to the next—and that's the amount of energy in just one lightning bolt. So harnessing lightning can't compete with fossil fuels, but it's still enough for a cuppa, so enjoy that zap of energy while you can.
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Thunderstorms occurred yesterday (Monday, 6/2/2017) over the west coast of the Balkans and the maritime areas south of Italy. The ZEUS lightning detection system recorded over 1000 flashes in these areas.
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Five students at a secondary school in Zimbabwe, Chinatsa Secondary School died while 34 were hospitalised after lightning struck the school during assembly on Thursday afternoon. According to teachers at the school, two students died on the spot while the other three died at Marondera Provincial Hospital where they had been referred to for treatment.
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NEW DELHI: More than 1,600 people died due to extreme weather conditions across the country last year, with severe heat wave claiming the largest chunk of the total deaths at 40%, followed by flooding and lightning. India Meteorological Department (IMD) said 2016 was the warmest year ever recorded, globally and in India. Phalodi in Rajasthan recorded 51 degrees Celsius, the highest ever temperature recorded in the country. January and February were the warmest winter months ever, according to IMD, which has been recording weather patterns since 1901. Bihar, Gujarat and Maharashtra topped the casualty list with the states contributing 35% of the total death toll. Together, they recorded 552 deaths due to extreme weather patterns. According to an IMD report, 40% of deaths were due to heat wave, which claimed over 700 lives, with Telangana and Andhra Pradesh together recording the maximum deaths i.e. more than 400. Gujarat and Maharashtra registered 87 and 43 deaths due to heat wave, respectively; cold wave claimed 53 lives. Lightning claimed more than 415 lives with the worst hit being Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Odisha alone recorded more than 132 deaths due to lightning, while 43 deaths occurred in Maharashtra. IMD last year started issuing summer and winter forecasts with heat wave and cold wave warnings. After two consecutive droughts, India last year had a normal monsoon, but several parts saw heavy to very heavy rainfall, that led to floods in many areas. Over 475 lives were lost in floods and thunderstorms. Bihar alone saw nearly 146 deaths due to flooding be tween July 25 to September 3.2016 saw four cyclonic storms in the Bay of Bengal, the major being severe cyclonic storm Vardah, which killed 18 people in Tamil Nadu. "Accurate predictions helped minimise loss of lives during Vardah and prediction of heavy rains. But when it comes to events like lightning, it becomes difficult as in several instances it takes places in villages and hamlets. Mobile companies can play a proactive role in helping disseminate information in a particular district or hamlet by sending alerts," IMD director general KJ Ramesh said.
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Slovakian motorcyclist Ivan Jakes has miraculously survived a lightning strike while riding his motorbike in the Dakar rally in South America, Slovakian radio reported on Thursday. The incident occurred during the rally’s third stage near the Argentinian city of San Salvador de Jujuy. The motorcyclist managed to put down one of his feet from the bike onto the ground, thanks to which the electric discharge went through him, the radio said. The motorcyclist feels well and wishes to continue his participation in the rally. This issue will be decided by doctors after Jake undergoes a comprehensive medical check-up, the radio said. The Dakar rally’s next stage 521 km long will be held on Thursday.
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Two planes have been struck by lightning in Denmark as Storm Urd sweeps across Scandinavia. In Germany, a woman has been killed after a tree fell onto her car in stormy weather. Two planes en route to Copenhagen in Denmark were struck by lightning on Monday. A Scandinavian Airlines flight from Reykjavik in Iceland was forced to make an emergency landing on the Danish island of Bornholm with more than 100 people on board. Passengers were due to continue their journey on Tuesday after staying on the island overnight. The plane had already been diverted after strong winds prevented it from landing in Copenhagen on Monday afternoon. The plane was then struck by lightning on approach to Malmö Airport, in Sweden, and subsequently redirected to Bornholm. A plane traveling from London was also struck by lightning but was able to complete its journey to the Danish capital. Copenhagen Airport warned that strong winds were likely to cause further disruption to flights on Tuesday. Storm Urd has swept over Scandinavia during the Christmas holidays, causing flooding, power blackouts and transport disruption across Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Authorities in all three countries reportedly advised people in the areas worst affected to consider staying at home on Monday night. Gales and heavy rain hit northern Germany on Monday. Emergency fire services in Hamburg attended some 80 call-outs in relation to the bad weather and there were reports of flooded property and toppling trees and scaffolding. In nearby Kiel, a 34-year-old woman was killed when a tree fell onto her car during stormy weather. A 24-year-old male passenger was taken to Kiel university hospital with serious injuries. Storm Conor brought rain and winds of up to 130 kilometers per hour to the north of the United Kingdom on Tuesday morning. This follows on from Storm Barbara, which left thousands of homes without power in northern Scotland last week. Further south, major roads were closed due to icy conditions.
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Petrified lightning, or rocks that have been zapped and superheated by a lightning strike, could reveal details about the shocking weather phenomenon, new research suggests. When lightning strikes a rock, the huge jolt of current heats up the material for microseconds, vaporizes substances inside and forms a glassy rock called fulgurite, study co-author Jiangzhi Chen, an applied physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said here Wednesday (Dec. 14) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. By analyzing the bubbles that form inside fulgurite, Chen and his colleagues can calculate hot the material gets, and that, in turn, can reveal insights into how exactly lightning works, Chen said. [Electric Earth: Stunning Images of Lightning] Lightning occurs when an electrical current is transmitted from clouds to the ground, illuminating the sky and creating dangerously high voltage. But even though this is one of the more everyday occurrences in nature, scientists understand very little about how lightning actually works. Researchers have a variety of methods of measuring the energy and current generated during a lightning strike, such as taking pictures of the actual strikes. But because lightning strikes are random, it can be hard to catch them in action. What's more, many of those methods can differ by several orders of magnitude, Chen said. By contrast, fresh fulgurite can be easily acquired a day or two after a lightning strike. The rock is also easily distinguishable: It has reddish patches and burn marks from the lightning strike, Chen said. Fulgurite is also filled with bubbles that form when substances such as carbon dioxide, water and oxygen in the rock vaporize, Chen added. To see if they could get understand the temperatures and energy levels reached when lightning strikes, Chen and his colleagues cut a piece of fulgurite rock from the top of Mount Mottarone in Italy. Chen then thinly sliced the rock, put it under a microscope, and characterized the size, distribution and number of vapor bubbles in the material. Scientists can determine the underlying composition of the rock by measuring the frequencies of light that reflect off of it. Knowing that, combined with a model of how frequently bubbles seed at different temperatures, Chen and his colleagues can come up with an estimation of just how hot the rock got during the lightning zap, and how long it stayed hot. That, in turn, can give some understanding of the lightning strike's total energy, he said. Still, there are some limitations in this estimate. When lightning strikes "only a fraction of the energy is actually transmitted to the rock," Chen told Live Science. The rest gets dissipated as it electrifies the air and causes the thunder that accompanies the strikes, among other things, he said. Right now, the findings are a matter of pure scientific curiosity, but they could potentially make it easier to study other huge shocks to the Earth, such as bomb blasts and meteorite strikes. "Those impact events are relatively to difficult to study, but lightning hitting a target is relatively easy to find," Chen said.
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SOUTH Australians were treated to a natural sky show last night as a severe thunderstorm delivered tens of thousands of lightning strikes across the state from Wednesday afternoon. More than 50,000 lightning strikes were recorded as the storm moved east across the state. The storm reached the city when night fell and persisted until about midnight, giving photographers plenty of opportunities to capture the perfect shot. Fresh strikes were still recorded in the North East Pastoral region about 11.30am on Thursday. Rain came with the lightning, with a good drenching at Mount Lofty. More than 28mm of rain was recorded in the Mount Lofty Ranges in the 24-hours to 9am on Thursday — the highest rainfall overnight in the state. The city copped about 8mm of rainfall while Charleston in the hills, received 23mm. Photographer Harley Cummins was driving home when he saw the skies lit up so he pulled over at Brighton Beach about 11pm. “The lightning just kept coming and coming,” he said. “It wasn’t until the lightning stopped before it started pouring.”
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A young boy has been taken to hospital and several people in a unit block have been assessed by paramedics after separate lightning strikes on homes on the Gold Coast. The five-year-old suffered burns to his hands and back around 4.45pm on Wednesday at a house at Tallai, said Gavin Fuller from Queensland Ambulance. “He was hanging onto a tap at the time the house or near the house was struck by lightning ... he’s been taken to Robina hospital in a stable condition,” Fuller said. It came after paramedics were called to a unit block in Miami, which was also struck by lightning. “That lightning has travelled through the roof, through the eaves, onto a metal fence and down into the cement, and it has blown quite a large hole in the cement,” Fuller said. Fortunately no one was injured in that situation, although a number of people, including a woman in her 50s, were treated at the scene for shock. The lightning strikes were due to thunderstorms rolling across the Gold Coast region, as well as the Sunshine Coast on Wednesday afternoon. The storms had largely moved out to sea by 5.45pm, however bureau forecaster Andrew Bufalino said volatile conditions would continue into the evening. It follows an early morning storm which rolled over the region leaving thousands without power as almost 40,000 lightning strikes hit, the second such early-morning display in as many days.
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A man has died and a woman was injured after lightning struck their campsite on a mountain summit in New South Wales. More than 6,000 lightning bolts lit up Sydney's sky as severe thunderstorms hit the state. "Lightning struck a tree, there was two campers were in a tent at the base of the tree and as a result we've had a male that's died and a woman that's been taken to hospital with neck injuries," says Tweed Byron Police Commander Wayne Starling. Two hikers tried to resuscitate the man for over an hour. At the storm's peak there were more than 500 strikes an hour. Beachgoers in Bondi were forced to find shelter. "There was the most incredible noise and explosion, the like of which I've never heard before," said Sydney local Geoff McIntyre. "And I thought God it seemed it hit just outside the window and then you could smell smoke and you couldn't see across the river." At the airport international flights were delayed. Ground staff were ordered undercover to avoid the risk of being struck. And this is just the start with meteorologists warning a destructive season's on its way.
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A brief but vicious storm has left a man struck by lightning, a house on fire, another struck by a falling tree, heavy rain and hail and delays to planes and trains. Sydney was hammered by the hour-long storm on Monday afternoon, wreaking havoc across the city. A yachtsman was hit by one of 5000 of lightning strikes and taken to hospital in Mona Vale, according to 9 News. In Huntleys Cove, on Sydney's Lower North Shore, a house caught fire after being struck by lightning. he mother and two daughters inside escaped safely. In Peakhurst, a house was damaged when a falling tree struck it, it was reported. Flights at the city's airport were delayed by up to two hours due to the storm. Motorists were also delayed after severe storms cut power to traffic signals across the city. All trains between Granville and Cabramatta were cancelled briefly on Monday afternoon as urgent repairs were undertaken on equipment battered by storms. Train passengers in most directions out of the city were told to brace for delays. Up to 16mm fell in Little Bay during the short but severe downpour. Earlier, asthma and hay fever suffers in Sydney were told to stay indoors after the predicted thunderstorms to avoid experiencing breathing problems. Respiratory physician Dr Jonathan Burdon, who chairs the National Asthma Council of Australia, said the rain was likely to stir rye grass starches and pollen which made going outside risky after the storm. 'It's really after the rain has been where the pollen gets ruptured and the starch granules start being released into the atmosphere,' he told Daily Mail Australia on Monday. 'Once the wind starts it will blow up the pollens.'
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The Monday evening storms flooded many homes and shops and turned streets into rivers in Kalloni and Plomari, on the island of Lesvos. Local media reported that there was more than 200 mm of rainfall in the evening, which caused many rivers to overflow. As a result the schools in the area of Kalloni will remain closed on Tuesday. Serious problems were also experienced in Plomari, where the Fire Brigade had to be called out to remove a car that was swept away by the Sedountas River. The Fire Brigade and municipal authorities are working hard to restore problems and have advised drivers not to move unnecessarily.
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