We’ve seen lots of rain lately, mostly on the return trip, but some since we’ve been home, too.  That got me to thinking about lightning, so I went surfing for some tidbits:

  • Most lightning strikes occur either at the beginning or end of a storm
  • The average lightning strike is 6 miles long
  • Lightning reaches 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, four times as hot as the sun’s surface
  • A cloud-to-ground lightning channel can be 2 to 10 miles long
  • Voltage in a cloud-to-ground strike is 100 million to 1 billion volts
  • Around the earth there are 100 lightning strikes per second, or 8,640,000 times a day.
  • 20% of all lightning victims die from the strike
  • 70% of survivors will suffer serious long-term effects
  • Americans are twice as likely to die from lightning as they are from a hurricane, tornado, or a flood

I don’t know about y’all dear readers, but this is a little creepy.  Anyway, I found this information here.