Dry lightning has ignited some of the most destructive and costly wildfires in California history, a new study shows.
Researchers found that over the past few decades, nearly half of the lightning strikes that hit the ground during spring and summer had been dry — there was no rain falling nearby. Dry lightning tends to happen in storms over areas of extreme drought, like the one California has been in for the past several years. The air is so dry that the rain evaporates before it hits the ground.
And the conditions that favor dry lightning are becoming more widespread and more frequent as the climate crisis fuel's the West's megadrought.
Dmitri Kalashnikov, lead author of the paper and a doctoral student at Washington State University, pointed to the wildfires that scorched California in 2020 — particularly the August Complex Fire, the largest wildfire in the state's history — as the motivation for the research.