Did Lightning Really Hit The Eiffel Tower?? And Could We Be Looking For An El-Nino This Year??

Alright..... Hey there!! I said I would have a map so you all could take a look at our one month outlook for precipitation over our area and here it is below. You can see we are in the area marked EC which means Equal chances for both above and below days of precipitation. One thing we will continue to watch for this year is a possible El-Nino jet stream pattern! El-Nino effects different areas of the USA, in different ways. El-Nino is known as the Wet One however it effects our area usually with droughts. Could this be the case this year?? We shall see..... I will keep you posted!I do see us starting to get into another stormy pattern starting as soon as next week possible! Yes, we will start to see more rain chances for our area..... Maybe even some more storm chances! But we will talk more about that on the Indiana Weather Blog a little later! First off it is Friday!!!!! YES! It is the best day of the week! ;) We will look for some Partly cloudy skies today with highs around 79* degrees. We will start to see some more clouds move into our area later on tonight as yet another cold front will push through our area bringing in some light rain chances! Yes, we will see some light rain pop up for our area later on tonight into early early Saturday morning. Currently I'M looking for rainfall to be around a Tenth inch or so. Currently not looking for much at this time.

Now I did find something from the NASA site about some lightning hitting the Eiffel Tower!! Can you believe it?? I thought you all would like to see this as well as I did. So here is the best picture I could find. It is a little blurry looking but still you can get a good idea..... Also here is a little something posted about this event. A rare phenomenon it was that is for sure!! Have another wonderful day Bloggers! I will check back soon....................

Believe it or not, bolts of lightning are shooting out of the Eiffel Tower. Photographer Hakim Atek caught it happening on May 25th:

"I saw some lightning out the window of my home in Paris," says Atek. "So I set up a tripod and pointed my camera at the Eiffel Tower. I never expected to get such an amazing picture."

But did the Tower really make its own lightning? The surprising answer is "yes."
"The upward branching in this photo shows that the Eiffel Tower actually initiated the discharge," says lightning researcher Richard Blakeslee of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "In other words, instead of starting in the cloud and coming to ground, this flash started when the tower 'launched' a leader that propagated upward toward the cloud (which still served as the source of the electric field needed to get the process going). As the leader ascended, it branched out. Eventually one of the branches reached a region of sufficient charge to 'short out the cloud' and produce the return stroke pictured above."

According to Martin Uman's classic text The Lightning Discharge, upward-initiated discharges are "relatively rare," accounting for less than 1% of all lightning, "and generally occur from mountain tops and tall man-made structures." K. Berger, who studied lightning from a mountaintop location 30+ years ago, was one of the first to describe the phenomenon.

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