summer lightning

Still, he said, it’s too early to accurately forecast the summer lightning season.

Kingston came to me from unexpected places: in the quietly exploding hearts of “Summer Lightning and Other Stories,” by Olive Senior, and Lorna Goodison’s “Heartease”; in the unseen Asian immigrant histories and uncommon gender identities in Patricia Powell’s “The Pagoda”; in the fever dream of Rastafari and ghetto life in “Brother Man,” by Roger Mais; in the ragamuffin poetics of Marcia Douglas’s “The Marvelous Equations of the Dread”; and in the metafictional bait and switch of “Wide Sargasso Sea,” by Jean Rhys.

But the real problem starts like clockwork each evening when hundreds of floodlights from the giant vehicle park illuminate the skyline so much that, on one recent night, a dramatic bolt of summer lightning looked like a faint flicker.

The new study focused on summer lightning flashes, or “strokes,” detected above 65 degrees latitude—that includes parts of northern Canada, Alaska and Russia, as well as Greenland and the central Arctic Ocean.

Even before freak summer lightning storms lit up the state weeks earlier than expected and Covid-19 and the climate crisis became dueling calamities, fire crews were bracing for season of record-breaking infernos across the west.