Shocker: Florida out as lightning king
Mississippi has most cloud-to-ground bolts
Florida has long claimed to have the nation’s fiercest lightning.
Strike that. The state is no longer indisputably the U.S. lightning leader. The most persistent bolts are not in Florida but, by a thin margin, occur along Mississippi’s Gulf of Mexico coast.
“That surprised me,” said Melanie Scott, a meteorologist with Vaisala. Her company specializes in lightning detection and provides the National Weather Service, airports and industry with statistics on when and where flashes occur.
The county with the most frequent, cloud-to-ground lightning flashes per square mile from 2008 to 2017, according to recent Vaisala analysis done at the request of the Orlando Sentinel, was Harrison County, Miss., known for the casinos of Biloxi.
Florida, however, still owns the distinction for deaths from lightning, said John Jensenius, the
National Weather Service’s lead lightning-safety specialist.
“Florida leads the nation, no doubt about it,” Jensenius said. “You have a lot of people who are vulnerable.”
Another revelation is that while other parts of Florida, especially Tampa Bay, previously and clearly led the state and nation, Orange County now ranks as the second most lightning-prone in the U.S. Seminole County is No. 3.
Mapping by Vaisala in 2012, reflecting data from 1997 through 2011, highlighted Florida as being prone overall to the most frequent lightning. But parts of the Gulf coastal regions of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana appeared as nearly in the same league as much of Florida.
That map also showed that the regions of Tampa Bay, Daytona Beach and Palm Beach County stood as more or less equals as the nation’s champs of lightning.
The newest map provided by Vaisala is based on the annual average of cloud-toground flashes per square mile.
The pace setters from just five years ago have fallen off the leaderboard. Now ranking 34th among counties in the nation is Palm Beach, with 23.3 flashes per square mile.
In 31st is Volusia at 23.5 flashes, while Hillsborough stands at 12th, with 25.7 flashes per square mile each year.
Among the new kings of lightning in Florida, according to Vaisala, is Seminole, taking second place in the state and third in the nation, with 28.672 flashes.
Just barely eclipsing Seminole for the state’s top spot and second nationally is Orange, with 28.674 flashes.
At No. 1, Harrison County is lashed at a rate of an even 29 flashes per square mile each year on average.
The remaining top 10 counties are in Southeast Louisiana and South Mississippi.
There were 16 lightning deaths across the United States last year — the lowest on record, which goes back to the 1940s, Jensenius said.
Last year, Florida had five deaths, followed by Alabama with three. In 2016, the U.S. had 39 deaths, led by Florida with 10.
Key reasons for declining deaths during the past 20 years are “education and awareness” and improved treatment for victims, Jensenius said.
Many Floridians have learned to live with lightning.
“I love to watch lightning, to look out the window during a storm,” said Karla Noelke, walking last week in downtown Orlando.
Orlando Utilities Commission goes well beyond industry standards for defensive measures.
OUC universally installs “shield” wires above transmission and distribution lines and doubles up on devices that “arrest” strike surges.
“Whether we are No. 1 or not, the decision was made long ago to protect our system,” said Keith Mutters, OUC director of reliability engineering.
An Oregon couple in Orlando for the Jackson Browne concert Tuesday said they had been at Lake Tohopekaliga in Osceola County for an airboat ride the day before. The captain entertained them with noteworthy stats.
“He told us this is the nation’s lightning capital,” Diane Dawson said.
Asked what she thought of Florida apparently losing that title, Dawson laughed and said: “We are happy if you are happy.”
Mike Efferson, National Weather Service forecaster in Slidell, La., which covers New Orleans and Biloxi, when told Harrison County holds the top “That’s crazy.”
Efferson said he and colleagues know acutely that lightning favors their coverage area but never suspected it occurs as the most intense in the U.S. by any measure.
Designating a lightning capital is largely up to “how you slice the data,” said Matt Bragaw, a National Weather Service meteorologist and lightning specialist for Central Florida.
Vaisala, which Bragaw and other forecasters referred to as highly credible, found in its recent analysis that Texas leads in lightning by state.
But Texas, averaging 3.3 million cloud-to-ground flashes annually, is four times as large as Florida, which gets 1.1 million flashes annually.
Bragaw said his past research found that Florida’s leaders included the Tampa Bay area, Cape Canaveral, Palm Beach County and Fort Myers.
Those areas are where coastal bends and bulges interact spot, said: potently with Atlantic and Gulf sea breezes that drive summer thunderstorms, he said.
“Tampa Bay typically seems to get the most lightning,” Bragaw said. “You have more sea-breeze collisions, bay-breeze collisions, the Pinellas peninsula acting on thunderstorm activity, just so many factors.”
Why the bull’s-eye of lightning frequency has shifted to the center of Central Florida according to Vailasa remains to be unraveled, Bragaw said.
He said an investigation might consider whether the change is from a warming climate, an intensifying heatisland effect in the growing Orlando area or other factors.
For now, at least in Florida, the Orlando area has new bragging rights.
“It looks like Seminole and Orange counties and maybe the northeast portion of Osceola County are in the running now as the lightning hot spot,” Bragaw said.