Chris Vagasky, Meteorologist and Lightnings Applications Manager for Vaisala, joined FOX Weather to talk more about lightning for Lightning Safety Awareness Week.
FAIRBANKS, Alaska — An intense warm and unstable weather pattern in the Arctic throes of Alaska brought a rare bout of strong, widespread thunderstorms that lit up the Last Frontier with an extreme number of lightning strikes Thursday.
Lightning sensors employed by Vaisala Xweather recorded an electrifying 78,506 lightning events across about 260 square miles of the northern third of Alaska over 24 hours Thursday. A lightning event can be a cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-air, or cloud-to-ground lightning strike — the latter of course, the most dangerous.
And there were plenty of the latter: 12,238 cloud-to-ground strikes, according to Scott Mackaro with Vaisala Xweather.
Lightning strikes over a 260 square mile area of Northern Alaska on June 27, 2024. (Lightning data and insights courtesy of Vaisala Xweather)
(Vaisala Xweather / FOX Weather)
How unusual is that? Mackaro says while the interior of Alaska does get some summer thunderstorms, they usually add up to a few hours of lightning a month.
This event seems to be about half a month’s entire lightning total in just a day, spanning several hours, Mackaro said, adding they’re still analyzing the data to find out just how rare the event would rank in the Alaska climate.
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Yet these storms weren’t just notable for their amount of lightning, but their location.
Some of the storms generated wind gusts of 50 mph and quarter-sized hail, prompting the NWS in Fairbanks to issue multiple Severe Thunderstorm Warnings across parts of the northwestern Arctic and North Slope boroughs early Thursday morning.
They became the northernmost — and westernmost — Severe Thunderstorm Warnings ever issued in the U.S. and its territories, according to Alaska climatologist Brian Brettschneider. The latest warning of the four issued Thursday reached 68.37 degrees North and 164.64 degrees West.
Satellite imagery shows severe thunderstorms moving across northwestern Alaska on June 27, 2024. The yellow boxes indicate Severe Thunderstorm Warnings.
(FOX Weather)
Lightning has been responsible for sparking dozens of wildfires in Alaska this summer. The Bureau of Land Management for Alaska says there are 144 active wildfires burning in the state, including 38 new fires that have started since midday Wednesday.
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The McDonald Fire has now burned nearly 120,000 acres after a lightning strike ignited the fire back on June 8. That and the nearby Clear Fire that has burned another 23,000 acres has poured smoke into Fairbanks and surrounding areas, degrading air quality. About 20 cabins remain under evacuation notices.
So far, 265 fires have burned over 225,000 acres across the state this year, according to the Alaska BLM.