Weak lightning in developing thunderstorms triggers deadly wildfire
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 28-Oct-2025 06:11 ET (28-Oct-2025 10:11 GMT/UTC)
Analysis revealed that ignition occurred during the development stage of the thunderstorm—not the mature stage as traditionally thought. The lightning frequency and intensity were lower in this phase, but the discharge characteristics were unique.
Heatwaves in the UK have led to unseasonable drying of vegetation bypassing natural ecological processes that limit the spread of wildfires, a new study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment found.
In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, a team of researchers investigated a fine-scale lightning forecasting approach based on weather foundation models (WFMs) and proposed a dual-source data-driven forecasting framework that integrates the strengths of both WFMs and recent lightning observations to enhance predictive performance. Furthermore, a gated spatiotemporal fusion network (gSTFNet) is designed to address the challenges of cross-temporal and cross-modal fusion inherent in dual-source data integration. Experimental results demonstrate that the dual-source framework significantly improves forecasting performance compared to models trained solely on WFMs and outperforms both the ECMWF HRES lightning product and other deep-learning spatiotemporal forecasting models.