Study: ‘weak’ correlation between warming, Southcentral lightning strikes

Lightning sparked about a quarter of the 218 wildfires reported in Alaska as of Monday. But those fires account for 97 percent of the more than 151,000 acres that have been burned by fire so far this year. And more than half of those acres were blackened by five fires around Galena and southwestern Alaska.
“The top five fires for this year so far have been lightning-started,” says Matt Clay, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Anchorage. During a webinar hosted