As of: January 26, 2024, 8:25 a.m
By: Katarina Amtmann
Comments
Press
Split
A Bavarian city is “Blitzcapital” 2023 (symbolic image).
© IMAGO / Jan Eifert
In 2023 there were 316,000 lightning strikes across Germany.
This is a small number compared to previous years.
In 2007 there were over a million.
Memmingen - In 2023, Germany experienced violent storms, but the atmosphere was less electrically charged than in many previous years.
By the way: Our Bavaria newsletter informs you about all the important stories from the Free State. Sign up here.
Memmingen “Lightning Capital” 2023 - 316,000 strikes nationwide
In 2023, Germany recorded a relatively low number of lightning strikes.
This is the result of measurements from the Lightning Information Service (BLIDS), which Siemens and the Austrian company OVE Service published on Friday, January 26th.
The measuring points registered 316,000 lightning strikes nationwide that hit the ground.
That was 30 percent more than in 2022, which was not very charged from a meteorological point of view, but less than in many other years.
Last year's “lightning capital” was Memmingen in the Allgäu with an average of 2.9 lightning strikes per square kilometer.
Pirmasens in the Palatinate Forest (2.8) took second place, followed by the Upper Bavarian district of Mühldorf (2.5).
The lowest lightning density was found in Amberg in the Upper Palatinate (0.08).
“Lightning capital” Memmingen: The most lightning strikes are in Bavaria
Overall, Bavaria was the state with the most lightning strikes: over 70,000 strikes were registered there, more than a fifth of the total number in Germany.
In particular, the foothills of the Alps - where Memmingen is located - is a relatively thunderstorm-prone region.
But because Bavaria is also the largest federal state, the absolute numbers alone do not provide an exact picture.
Calculating lightning density allows experts to determine where most thunderstorms with lightning and thunder occur, regardless of the size of a state.
In 2023, Baden-Württemberg was ahead of Bavaria with 1.3 impacts per square kilometer.
There were significantly fewer thunderstorms in the far north: Hamburg (0.37) and Schleswig-Holstein (0.38) were at the bottom of this table.
My news
Chaos due to freezing rain school closures in Bavaria: Ministry spokesman justifies organization reading
Tree massacre causes horror: employee clears 50-year-old willows without permission
School bus crashes into fire station – child and bus driver seriously injured in accident in Upper Bavaria
“Watch out for falling objects”: Weather warnings for Bayernlese again
Because of deer on the road: school bus slides three meters down read
“This is Habeck speaking”: Vice Chancellor suddenly calls for metal workers after a protest
In 2007 there were over a million flashes: in 2023 “only” 316,000
The number of lightning strikes, as well as the communities and regions with the most lightning strikes, vary from year to year depending on weather conditions.
There is less lightning in dry summers, but a single severe thunderstorm can cause a community to rise in the rankings.
In a long-term comparison, 2023 was not particularly lightning-rich: in 2007 over a million lightning strikes were registered, in 2020 there were 399,000 and in 2021 491,000.
2022 was a rather quiet year in terms of thunderstorms, with only 242,000 impacts.
The lightning atlas was published for the last time with the participation of Siemens.
The group sold the service to the Austrian company OVE, which took over the 170 measuring stations.
(came)
What is lightning?
“Lightning is nothing more than a discharge of sparks or a momentary electric arc within clouds or between clouds and the earth.
The cause is the separation of positive and negative charges within a cloud.
This happens when water droplets collide with ice grains.”
“You can easily estimate the distance of lightning: count the seconds between lightning and thunder and divide the value by three.
This gives you the distance in kilometers.”
Source: Wetteronline
You can find more news in our brand new Merkur.de app, now in an improved design with more personalization functions.
Directly available for download, more information can be found here.
Are you an enthusiastic user of WhatsApp?
Merkur.de will now keep you up to date via a new Whatsapp channel.
Click here to go directly to the channel.
The editor wrote this article and then used an AI language model for optimization at her own discretion. All information has been carefully checked.
Find out more about our AI principles here.