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Night was turned to day late Tuesday night as the streets of downtown Chicago were lit up by thousands of lightning strikes. At the height of the storm, there were 300 lightning strikes in a 15-minute time frame, which equates to 20 strikes per minute, or nearly one every three seconds! That’s blinding.

The storm that struck Chicago (literally) was part of a decaying line of storms left over from a severe event that happened early Tuesday. The storm system produced several tornadoes across parts of Iowa and Illinois, but it was the lightning that really stole the show. By 2 a.m. Eastern time, an accumulated 33,000 lightning strikes lit up the skies from Missouri to Lake Michigan. I’m sure there were a lot of tired people come Wednesday morning.

To me, some of the most spectacular and wow-worthy weather visuals each year come after thunderstorms hit Chicago after dark. The reason? Skyscrapers!

The city of Chicago boasts three particularly impressive skyscrapers: Willis Tower (commonly known as the Sears Tower), Trump Tower and the John Hancock Center. These steel giants get hit by lightning between 50 and 100 times each year. The tallest of the three — the Willis Tower — gets hit the most, and in the most active years can get struck as many as 100 times.

Skyscrapers are, of course, easy targets for lightning strikes, made of metal and sticking out as the tallest objects in an area, basically thousand-foot-tall lightning rods. With that said, they are designed specially to handle direct lightning strikes, featuring <a href="http://stormhighway.com/lightning_strikes_sears_tower.php">lightning conductor “crown” frames</a> on the tall spires or antennas on the tops of the buildings. These prevent the lightning strikes from damaging the buildings by distributing the incredible electric current from the lightning strike away from the building, often manifested in the form of sparks.

Lightning is one of nature’s most impressive, but also most dangerous, phenomenon. Five times hotter than the sun and packing approximately 1 billion (that’s nine zeroes) joules of energy, it is impossible to predict where and what it will strike at any given moment. It’s beautiful and blinding, extraordinary yet unpredictable, and desired but deadly all at the same time.

Earlier in the article, I mentioned Chicago thunderstorms produce some of the most incredible weather imagery of the year, and this week certainly did not disappoint!

Kathryn Prociv

The Washington Post

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