Every year, scientists learn something new about the inner workings of lightning.With satellites, they have discovered that more than 1.2 billion lightning flashes occur around the world every year. (Rwanda has the most flashes per square kilometer, while flashes are rare in polar regions.) Laboratory and field experiments have revealed that the core of some lightning bolts reaches 30,000 Kelvin (53,540 ºF), a temperature hot enough to instantly melt sand and break oxygen and nitrogen molecules into individual atoms.
And then there is this: each of those billion lightning flashes produces a puff of nitrogen oxide gas (NOx) that reacts with sunlight and other gases in the atmosphere to produce ozone. Near Earth’s surface, ozone can harm human and plant health; higher in the atmosphere, it is a potent greenhouse gas; and in the stratosphere, its blocks cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation.
In 1827, the German chemist Justin von Liebig first observed that lightning produced NOx—scientific shorthand for a gaseous mixture of nitrogen and oxygen that includes nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2). Nearly two centuries later, the topic continues to attract the attention of scientists.
Fossil fuel combustion, microbes in the soil, lightning, and forest fires all produce NOx. Scientists think lightning's contribution to Earth's NOx budget—probably about 10 percent—is relatively small compared to fossil fuel emissions. Yet they haven't been sure whether global estimates of NOx produced by lightning are accurate.
"There's still a lot of uncertainty about how much NOx lightning produces," said Kenneth Pickering, an atmospheric scientist who studies lightning at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Indeed, even recent published estimates of lightning's global NOx production still vary by as much as a factor of four. We're trying to narrow that uncertainty in order to improve the accuracy of both global climate models and regional air quality models."
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