Brazil has registered 45 deaths caused by lightning so far this year, while the country only reported 46 deaths in the whole of 2007, said Brazil's National Institute of Spatial Research (Inpe) Tuesday.
The rise of lightning-linked deaths in Brazil was related to the La Nina phenomenon, the cooling of the waters in the Pacific Ocean that globally alters the circulation of winds and favors the formation of storms, according to Osmar Pinto Junior, a researcher at Inpe.
He said he was surprised by the sharp rise of casualties. "We had forecast that lightning incidents would have been more frequent due to the La Nina phenomenon, but we would have never imagined that the numbers of deaths would almost double," he said.
La Nina is a large pool of unusually cold water in the equatorial Pacific that develops every few years and influences global weather. It is the climatic opposite of El Nino, a warming of the Pacific, and both have been associated with extreme weather around the globe.
Source:Xinhua
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