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1 .This is Scientific American 60-Second Earth. I'm Christopher Intagliata. Got a minute?
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2 .You might think of weather as a local or regional phenomenon.
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3 .But when it comes to lightning storms, what happens 93 million miles away¡ at, you guessed it, the Sun¡ can actually affect the frequency of thunderbolts.
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4 .That's according to a study in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
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5 ."So the Sun is essentially a bar magnet.
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6 .And as it rotates around half the time its field points towards the Earth and half the time its field points away from the Earth."
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7 .Study author Mathew Owens, an environmental physicist at the University of Reading in the U.K.
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8 .He and his colleagues analyzed lightning strikes in the U.K.over a six-year period.
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9 .And they found that when the Sun's magnetic field was pointed away from the Earth, lightning strikes in the U.K went up 50 percent.
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10 .Owens says what they think is happening is the Sun's magnetic field affects the Earth's magnetic field, stretching and skewing it, which allows more cosmic rays to hit the atmosphere.
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11 .That's important, because cosmic rays can trigger lightning.
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12 ."Some groups in America do outrageously cool things like fire rockets with metal wires attached to them into clouds.
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13 .And that directly triggers the lightning.
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14 .thus the lighting then has a nice conducting metal wire to travel land
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15 .Nature doesn't do that, of course.
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16 .But cosmic rays serve a similar purpose.
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17 ."These energetic particles that are coming from space essentially produce thin channels of ionization that behave like a thin metal wire.
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18 .And that enables lightning to occur from the bottom of the cloud to the Earth."
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19 .These types of studies could eventually improve lightning forecasts, Owens says.
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20 .And since lightning strikes are predicted to increase in a warming world¡ we may end up seeing less of the Sun itself¡ but more of its electrifying influence.
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21 .Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American's 60-Second Earth. I'm Christopher Intagliata.
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