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Thunderstorm Was In Vicinity of Oil Rig Disaster

Apr 22, 2010; 3:31 PM ET

UPDATE 6/18/10: Since this is coming up again, because of this amateur video here is the lightning map. The only strike was 30 miles from the rig at 10:18 PM so there is no evidence that lightning caused this unless the explosion time is wrong (location of rig based on Google), or my Vaisala data is wrong (the accuracy of the data itself should be a mile or so). Here's the lightning map:

CNN says that the oil rig has sunk. If you've been under a rock, this is the Transocean Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig which exploded on Tuesday night, injuring 17 and 11 are still missing. Initial blame is being placed on some sort of a pressure buildup.

One thing the media is not reporting about the oil rig disaster was that there was a thunderstorm in the vicinity of the rig at the time when it exploded. Here's a map where I have overlaid a radar image from AccuWeather.com RadarPlus on to a satellite photo taken the next day (which shows the location of the rig, because the exact position isn't documented, as far as I can tell).

In my opinion it is extremely unlikely that the thunderstorm had anything to do with it. For one, the storm dissipated before 10 PM, when the explosion is said to have taken place. Although the storm itself is close enough (in theory) for a lightning strike to travel out away from it, I also looked at the actual lightning data from Vaisala, which shows the ground location of the strike, and the closest was about 30 miles from the rig, judging its location by the traffic on Marinetraffic.com today (see image below). Vaisala's lightning strike data is normally accurate to a few hundred meters and detects almost all strikes, this close to land.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com

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