Cities incite thunderstorms, researchers find

This shows the pattern of lightning strikes near Baltimore and Washington, D.C. during the rare and extreme 2004 thunderstorm. The number of strikes for a given area can be found in the center of concentric yellow circles. Much of the lightning during the 2004 storm wrapped around the western edges of Baltimore and Washington, D.C., to the south. "It's as if all of a sudden the lightning can 'feel' the city," said Nteleko, a Princeton graduate student in civil and environmental engineering who is a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson School’s Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy program. Courtesy Alexander Ntelekos, Princeton University