New climate models have predicted a 50 percent increase in lightning strikes across the world during this century as a result of warming temperatures associated with climate change.

University of California, Berkeley's climate scientist David Romps and his colleagues looked at predictions of precipitation and cloud buoyancy in 11 different climate models and conclude that their combined effect would generate more frequent electrical discharges to the ground.

With warming, thunderstorms become more explosive that is related with water vapour, which is the fuel for explosive deep convection in the atmosphere. Warming causes there to be more water vapour in the atmosphere, and more fuel lying around simply implies explosive results with ignition.

More lightning strikes mean more human injuries estimates of people struck each year range from the hundreds to nearly a thousand, with many deaths. Another significant impact of increased lightning strikes is highlighted as being more wildfires, since half of all fires, and often the hardest to fight, are ignited by lightning. More lightning also would likely generate more nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere, which exert a strong control on atmospheric chemistry.

While some studies have shown changes in lightning associated with seasonal or year-to-year variations in temperature, there have been no reliable analyses to indicate what the future may hold.

"Lightning is caused by charge separation within clouds, and to maximize charge separation, you have to loft more water vapour and heavy ice particles into the atmosphere," said David Romps. "We already know that the faster the updrafts, the more lightning, and the more precipitation, the more lightning".

Precipitation - the total amount of water hitting the ground in the form of rain, snow, hail or other forms – is basically a measure of how convective the atmosphere is, and convection generates lightning. The ascent speeds of those convective clouds are determined by a factor called CAPE, convective available potential energy, which  is measured by balloon-borne instruments, called radiosondes.

CAPE is a measure of how potentially explosive the atmosphere is, that is, how buoyant a parcel of air would be if it gets convecting and punches through overlying air into the free troposphere. The researchers hypothesized that the product of precipitation and CAPE would predict lightning.