Lightning causes many deaths, injuries, and property damage each year. Lightning parameters, such as flash density, are maximized in tropical regions, as are related impacts. Just recently, in March 2021, a top surfer in El Salvador, an Olympic hopeful, was killed by a lightning strike. Over the past three years, Jamaica has experienced several fatalities, casualties, and damages to infrastructure due to lightning. Several casualties involved high school sports, indicating the need for greater awareness of lightning and lightning safety measures among the youth. Additionally, the economies of least-developed countries, such as those in the Caribbean and Central America, suffer due to property loss, damage of electrical and electronic equipment and systems, downtime due to service outages and data losses and problems in power quality.
The Caribbean Meteorological Organization (CMO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warmly welcome you to this virtual symposium, where we will share information on lightning and its impacts, lightning safety education and awareness, lightning injuries and injury prevention, the science of lightning, monitoring of lightning, forecast applications, and lightning as an essential climate variable.
To help us understand what you know about lightning and your role in lightning safety, please complete our pre-symposium survey.
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The video of both days are available for download as zipped files, each approximately 2.2GB. The videos are offered in two language formats, English only and in the language of the presenter.