No Need to Fear Lightning: It Cleans Your Air!

A NASA plane flew over Colorado and Oklahoma, United States in 2012 to gather information about lightning. Now, upon analyzing the data under a different light, it appears that the meteorological phenomenon helps to clean the atmosphere.

“Through history, people were only interested in lightning bolts because of what they could do on the ground,” says meteorologist William Brune, from Penn State University. “Now there is increasing interest in the weaker electrical discharges in thunderstorms that lead to lightning bolts.” Even though most lightning bolts don’t reach the ground, within clouds, they set off chemical reactions that lead to the oxidation of the atmosphere, in an estimated proportion of 2 to 16% on a global scale.

The recent study of the data collected from above the anvil – or the top portion – of storm clouds show that lightning bolts produce more than nitric oxide and hydroxide, already known to flush out gases. They generate pollutant catching oxidants such as hydroxyl (OH) and hydroperoxyl (HO₂) which have the ability to remove greenhouse gases like methane and carbon monoxide.