As I said last week, for some reason (I'm a little OCD?) I am obsessed with finding out exactly what lightning strikes hit. I recently investigated two lightning strikes here in Central PA. Today I bring you the results of the second one, which hit in my very own neighborhood. All in all, neither of these investigations were very fruitful - and I had hope after the obvious lightning damage that I investigated with Henry Margusity in August 2007.

Strike #2: Documented Via Reports - "The Landings" State College, Pennsylvania - June 8, 2009

Below is a map showing the location of the strike (again by Vaisala) at the blue "X". Looking at the previous strike investigation and Vaisala's "ellipse of confidence", they are suggesting that the strike could have been anywhere on this map. The yellow box is my attempt at estimating where I think it could have hit, based on the discussion below.

There are a couple interesting things about this lightning strike. First, it was heard or seen by no fewer than 8 people, mostly my cronies at AccuWeather. One witness was at the corner of Science Park Road & College Avenue and saw the strike directly in front of him (in the direction of the orange arrow). This is probably just due to its proximity to AccuWeather HQ [Google Map]; it was not a "positive giant" strike - it was a negative strike at about 24,000 Amps, bigger than the strike previously investigated but not terribly strong - strikes in the area ranged from -120,000 to +52,000 Amps.

The second interesting thing is that this strike occurred outside of the rain from the storm. This is a good safety lesson for you: It doesn't have to be raining for lightning to occur. I was nearby (just off the southwest corner of the map) filming the storm (see pics & videos). I remember the strike happening, but I didn't get it on film. It was probably just to the left of the camera's field of vision about halfway through this timelapse. A second storm was forming on the southern end of the original storm, which was moving to the northeast. It's hard to say which storm we can blame for the strike, but it was definitely a mile or two from the rain. Here's a radar map from AccuWeather.com RadarPlus, zoomed out to beyond the city level:

Once again however, I have come up empty-handed finding where the strike hit. I walked and biked around the yellow box above for a couple hours the following day, and couldn't find any evidence. If it had hit a house, I think we would have known it. Dale, who works at AccuWeather was home at the time, and he lives only 2 or 3 houses down from where Vaisala places the strike. He said it was VERY loud but he didn't see where it hit for sure. He did say, however, that he heard no sirens or mayhem in the community, which I think means it didn't hit a house. Nobody has lightning rods so if it had hit a house it would have blown a hole in the roof or probably set it on fire (I also didn't see anybody piling appliances at the curb in the days following, which might have been a sign that lightning had hit a house).

My guess at this point is that it probably hit something at the industrial plant or ball field on the northwest side of the yellow box. If it hit a light pole, power line, or industrial building that was grounded properly, we'd never know. Everything in our neighborhood is very low to the ground, even the trees aren't all that tall (and there are few enough of them that I could investigate them easily). There's really no reason for lightning to hit anything in our neighborhood (though everything that lightning does doesn't always make sense to us humans).

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