Media Vs. Casey Anthony Lightning Strike
I thought I would be able to stay out of the controversy surrounding the Casey Anthony court case, and I don't want to be macabre, but some in the media are taking "scientific license" with a weather event that occurred yesterday. A thunderstorm passed through Orlando yesterday, and a tree struck by lightning was photographed near the site of the makeshift memorial for Caylee.
My first thought was that this was a previous lightning strike that had just been discovered after the storm, because there were no eye-witnesses. From what I've seen, the worst damage from lightning damage on trees is often high, and people might not have noticed it previously. Based on the video from CNN, which showed bark shavings on the road, however, it's reasonable to presume that lightning did hit the tree yesterday.
That said, let's look at the data particularly between 1 PM and 3 PM Thursday courtesy Vaisala (Casey is said to have arrived home at 2 PM, just before the storm struck). The map above shows all cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in the area and the "x" is the approximate location of Suburban Drive, where the strike occurred.
Yes, it's very coincidental that the largest concentration of lightning strikes in the state happened to be in Orlando, but that's not unusual in Florida. Correlation isn't causation. Over 1,000 strikes hit something in central Florida during those two hours (including the Space Shuttle -- also not unusal). In downtown Orlando, lightning also hit a tree and felled it on a bus, knocking out power to 900 people. If you look at the lightning strikes from the last week (there were over 14,000), the coincidental geographical placement goes away completely:
According to Vaisala's new average strikes map, the Orlando area gets around 30 cloud-to-ground strikes ("flashes") per year for each square mile (almost "off the scale") which means if lightning were to strike a tree anywhere, it probably would do it there. Tens of millions of lightning strikes hit in the U.S. each year, according to data from Vaisala and many of them involve trees. I would guess that you could find similar tree damage on every block in Orlando.
In fact the strongest storm day in the past three years featured 1 million lightning strikes hitting the United States in two days! With that many lightning strikes, there are many, many things going on around trees that are hit. The rub is that Orlando happens to have the highest lightning rate in our country, so everything that happens there happens around lightning sometimes. I'm chalking this one up to coincidence. The media isn't carrying that part of the story for the most part - not talking about how common it is for lightning to strike a tree there.
