Deep learning technique enhances lightning risk prediction for power grids

Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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Lightning risk prediction technology for power grids

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Credit: the Laboratory of Lightning Monitoring and Protection Technology of State Grid Corporation of China

Lightning is one of the primary causes of transmission line trips, posing a significant threat to the safety of power grids. However, due to the complexity and sporadic nature of lightning, achieving accurate forecasts has always been a challenge.

 

Recently, researchers at the China National Energy Key Laboratory of Lightning Disaster Detection, Early Warning and Safety Protection，as well as the Laboratory of Lightning Monitoring and Protection Technology of State Grid Corporation of China, have made significant breakthroughs in lightning prediction. By developing a deep learning–based nowcasting model, they can effectively predict the location and frequency trends of organized thunderstorms, providing robust support for predicting lightning risks to power grids. This research has been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters.

 

The research team utilized wide-area lightning monitoring data from the State Grid Corporation of China and geostationary satellite imagery, combined with Convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit (Conv-GRU) networks and attention mechanism modules, to develop the lightning nowcasting model.

 

“Our model not only accurately predicts where lightning will occur, but also forecasts its frequency. It has shown excellent performance in predicting a winter thunderstorm in Central China and a spring tornadic thunderstorm in South China,” says Dr Fengquan Li, the first author of the paper.

 

Dr Jian Li, the academic leader of the laboratory, points out that, “In the future, we plan to enhance the accuracy of our lightning prediction model by integrating more data sources related to lightning formation, and further optimizing the model framework. This will better support the prediction of, and protection against, lightning disasters affecting power grids.”

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Journal

Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters

DOI

10.1016/j.aosl.2025.100607 

‘Microlightning’ in water droplets may have sparked life on Earth

Stanford University

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Life may not have begun with a dramatic lightning strike into the ocean but from many smaller “microlightning” exchanges among water droplets from crashing waterfalls or breaking waves.

New research from Stanford University shows that water sprayed into a mixture of gases thought to be present in Earth’s early atmosphere can lead to the formation of organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds, including uracil, one of the components of DNA and RNA.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, adds evidence – and a new angle – to the much-disputed Miller-Urey hypothesis, which argues that life on the planet started from a lightning strike. That theory is based on a 1952 experiment showing that organic compounds could form with application of electricity to a mixture of water and inorganic gases.

In the current study, the researchers found that water spray, which produces small electrical charges, could do that work all by itself, no added electricity necessary.

“Microelectric discharges between oppositely charged water microdroplets make all the organic molecules observed previously in the Miller-Urey experiment, and we propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life,” said senior author Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Natural Science and professor of chemistry in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.

Microlightning’s power and potential

For a couple billion years after its formation, Earth is believed to have had a swirl of chemicals but almost no organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds, which are essential for proteins, enzymes, nucleic acids, chlorophyll, and other compounds that make up living things today.

How these biological components came about has long puzzled scientists, and the Miller-Urey experiment provided one possible explanation: that lightning striking into the ocean and interacting with early planet gases like methane, ammonia, and hydrogen could create these organic molecules. Critics of that theory have pointed out that lightning is too infrequent and the ocean too large and dispersed for this to be a realistic cause.

Zare, along with postdoctoral scholars Yifan Meng and Yu Xia, and graduate student Jinheng Xu, propose another possibility with this research. The team first investigated how droplets of water developed different charges when divided by a spray or splash. They found that larger droplets often carried positive charges, while smaller ones were negative. When the oppositely charged droplets came close to each other, sparks jumped between them. Zare calls this “microlightning,” since the process is related to the way energy is built up and discharged as lightning in clouds. The researchers used high-speed cameras to document the flashes of light, which are hard to detect with the human eye.

Even though the tiny flashes of microlightning may be hard to see, they still carry a lot of energy. The researchers demonstrated that power by sending sprays of room temperature water into a gas mixture containing nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia gases, which are all thought to be present on early Earth. This resulted in the formation of organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds including hydrogen cyanide, the amino acid glycine, and uracil.

The researchers argue that these findings indicate that it was not necessarily lightning strikes, but the tiny sparks made by crashing waves or waterfalls that jump-started life on this planet.

“On early Earth, there were water sprays all over the place – into crevices or against rocks, and they can accumulate and create this chemical reaction,” Zare said. “I think this overcomes many of the problems people have with the Miller-Urey hypothesis.”

Zare’s research team focuses on investigating the potential power of small bits of water, including how water vapor may help produce ammonia, a key ingredient in fertilizer, and how water droplets spontaneously produce hydrogen peroxide.

“We usually think of water as so benign, but when it’s divided in the form of little droplets, water is highly reactive,” he said.

Acknowledgements

Zare is also a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Cardiovascular Institute, Stanford Cancer Institute, and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute as well as an affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

This research received support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adt8979 

Article Title

Spraying of Water Microdroplets Forms Luminescence and Causes Chemical Reactions in Surrounding Gas

Article Publication Date

14-Mar-2025

 

Smoke from wildland-urban interface fires more deadly than remote wildfires

Emissions are proportionately three times more likely to lead to premature deaths

National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

The smoke from fires that blaze through the wildland-urban interface (WUI) has far greater health impacts than smoke from wildfires in remote areas, new research finds.

The study, published this week in Science Advances, estimates that emissions from WUI fires are proportionately about three times more likely to lead to annual premature deaths than emissions from wildfires in general. This is because the fires, and their associated emissions, are far closer to populated areas.

The work was conducted by an international team of researchers, led by scientists at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR). The study drew on a database of WUI fires and advanced computer modeling techniques.

“Even though the emissions of WUI fires are relatively small globally, the health impacts are proportionately large because they’re closer to human populations,” said NSF NCAR scientist Wenfu Tang, the lead author. “Pollutants emitted by WUI fires such as particulate matter and the precursors to ozone are more harmful because they’re not dispersing across hundreds or thousands of miles.”

The study was funded by NOAA and NSF.

The spread of WUI fires

The wildland-urban interface is the geographic area where wildland vegetation and developed land come together or intermingle. WUI areas have been expanding on all populated continents and now constitute about 5% of the world’s land area, excluding Antarctica.

With this expansion have come devastating fires. Some of the deadliest WUI blazes in recent years include the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Australia that directly killed 173 people, the 2018 Attica fires in Greece that killed 104, and the 2023 Lahaina Fire in Hawaii that killed 100. At the beginning of this year, a disastrous outbreak of fires in Southern California burned an estimated 16,000 homes, businesses, and other structures, with estimates of financial losses ranging up to $250 billion or higher.

A previous study led by Tang used satellite observations and machine learning techniques to show that the fraction of global fires that occur in WUI areas has increased significantly this century. 

Building on that work, Tang and her colleagues wanted to estimate the health effects of the fire emissions beyond the immediate deaths. Certain pollutants associated with smoke, such as fine particulate matter and ground-level ozone, are especially harmful to cardiovascular and respiratory systems.

The researchers turned to an advanced NSF NCAR–based computer model, the Multi-Scale Infrastructure for Chemistry and Aerosols (MUSICA), to simulate pollutants from fires. Their modeling included carbon monoxide chemical tracers, which enabled them to estimate the sources of emissions and differentiate between wildland and WUI fires.

They also used a dataset of WUI fires in the recent two decades worldwide, which Tang and her colleagues developed last year. 

To compare emissions of WUI fires with those from wildland fires, the researchers simulated four scenarios. These consisted of: no fires, both WUI and wildland fires, WUI fires only, and wildland fires only. The difference between all fires and just wildland fires indicated the impacts of WUI fire emissions.

The results showed that WUI fire emissions constituted 3.1% of all fire emissions across the six populated continents in 2020. However, the fractional contribution of WUI fire emissions to premature deaths was 8.8% of all fire emissions because of how many people were affected by smoke from WUI fires.

The numbers varied by continent depending on the proximity of dense populations to WUI fires. In North America, for example, WUI fires represented 6% of all fires and 9.3 % of premature deaths from emissions. In Europe, however, those numbers were 11.4% and 13.7%, respectively.

A critical factor that Tang wants to examine next is the difference in emissions from wildland fires that consume trees and other vegetation as opposed to WUI fires that burn down structures that often contain additional toxic substances. The smoke from different burned materials may have widely varying impacts on human health.

“It is very important to have an emission inventory that explicitly accounts for the burning of structures,” Tang said. “We need to know what is being burned in order to determine what is going up in smoke.”

About the study

Title: Disproportionately large impacts of wildland-urban interface fire emissions on global air
quality and human health
Authors: Wenfu Tang, Louisa K. Emmons, Christine Wiedinmyer, Debatosh B. Partha, Yaoxian
Huang, Cenlin He, Junzhe Zhang, Kelley C. Barsanti, Benjamin Gaubert, Duseong S.
Jo, Jun Zhang, Rebecca Buchholz, Simone Tilmes, Francis Vitt, Claire Granier, Helen M. Worden, and Pieternel F. Levelt
Publication: Science Advances

This material is based upon work supported by the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, a major facility sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.
 

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adr2616 

Article Title

Disproportionately large impacts of wildland-urban interface fire emissions on global air quality and human health

Article Publication Date

14-Mar-2025

 

Sharks are dying at alarming rates, mostly due to fishing. Retention bans may help

Data reveals that retention bans are a good first step, but won’t be enough to prevent continued decline

University of California - Santa Barbara

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Sharks are often observed with hooks, scars or other evidence of encounters with fisherman. This Caribbean reef shark was spotted in the Bahamas with a wire leader hanging from her mouth. It has been illegal to catch sharks in the Bahamas since 2011.

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Credit: Shane Gross

Despite the fear they may inspire in humans, sharks have far more reason to fear us. Nearly one-third of sharks are threatened with extinction globally, mostly as a result of fishing.

A team led by researchers at UC Santa Barbara discovered that mandates to release captured sharks won’t be enough to prevent the continued decline of these important ocean predators. These findings, published in Fish & Fisheries, highlight the importance of monitoring shark populations and combining different strategies for managing their numbers.

Some sharks are targeted by fisheries, but the pressure extends beyond these species. “More than half of sharks that are caught and killed in fisheries are captured incidentally and then discarded,” explained Darcy Bradley, co-author of the study and adjunct faculty at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy.

Some species are protected by retention bans, issued by regional fisheries management organizations, which require fishermen to release an individual they catch rather than keep it. Currently, 17 oceanic shark species are covered by a retention ban to protect them from incidental catch in tuna fisheries.

The team had a simple question in mind. “For all shark species that we know are caught in fisheries, how many are dead by the time they are landed or soon after release as a result of capture?” said co-lead author Allie Caughman, a doctoral candidate at the Bren School. They were also curious how certain regulations affected shark survival after.

The authors collated available data from more than 150 published papers and reports that have measured shark mortality upon hauling (at-vessel) or soon after release (post-release). The literature spanned nearly 150 different shark species caught by different fishing gears. Using this information, they could estimate mortality rates for an additional 341 shark species incidentally captured by longlines or gillnets but for which empirical data wasn’t available.

Small sharks and several threatened species were the most likely to die after being caught. These included thresher sharks and hammerheads. Mortality was also higher for smaller species, those that occur in deeper waters and those that rely on constant swimming to breathe.

“Mortality was surprisingly high for some species such as smoothhound sharks,” said co-lead author Leonardo Feitosa, also a doctoral candidate at the Bren School, “ranging from 30 to 65%.” Deep-water species, like sleeper sharks, also fared poorly, likely due to the trauma of the extreme pressure change.

Policy simulations showed that retention bans could reduce shark mortality three-fold, on average, but that this wasn’t enough to reduce mortality to sustainable fishing levels for already heavily fished species, like mako and silky sharks. “Retention bans are a beneficial first step towards addressing shark overfishing,” said Bradley, “but they need to be complemented with other strategies, such as area-based fishing restrictions, catch quotas and fishing gear requirements to sustain populations for many shark species.”

Bans are most likely to benefit species with faster reproductive rates — like blue sharks, bonnetheads and angel sharks — because their populations tend to recover faster. The blue shark is actually the most heavily fished species worldwide. “While it is highly unlikely that retention bans will ever be implemented for such a commercially important species,” Feitosa said, “our results show that this could be a relatively simple and impactful strategy if it becomes necessary to sustain populations.”

For other sharks, maintaining healthy populations will require additional strategies. Methods to reduce catch rates to begin with — such as banning the use of steel wire on longlines — could complement retention bans. Spatial regulations could also help bolster shark populations, such as closing off shark nurseries and pupping grounds.

Assembling this study also highlighted the need for more data on mortality rates for other cartilaginous fishes, like stingrays, skates and chimaeras. “Fifty-seven percent of cartilaginous fishes threatened with extinction in the world are not sharks,” Caughman explained. The team couldn’t include these groups in the paper due to the dearth of data.

Members of the team from The Nature Conservancy are currently meeting with the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission’s scientific staff to collaborate on this issue. This work will help to advance and inform those dialogues as they work to identify the suite of appropriate strategies required to advance shark conservation.

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Journal

Fish and Fisheries

Article Title

Retention Bans Are Beneficial but Insufficient to Stop Shark Overfishing

Article Publication Date

13-Mar-2025

 

Good fences make good neighbors (with carnivores)

Fortified corrals prevent carnivore attacks on nearby livestock too, study finds

Colorado State University

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Mzee Hwenge, a livestock owner in Tanzania, worked with conservation organization Lion Landscapes to construct this chain-link corral to protect his livestock from predators at night. Research has shown that pens such as these not only reduce the risk of losing livestock to carnivores, but they also benefit nearby livestock keepers. Photo by Lion Landscapes 

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Credit: Lion Landscapes

A predator’s gotta eat, but sometimes what they eat harms people sharing the landscape, and that often leads to the carnivore’s death.  

Fortified corrals are one strategy used in Tanzania to protect both livestock and vulnerable carnivore species. But then where do lions, leopards and hyenas go for dinner? Do they feed on the next herd over?  

A new study led by Colorado State University has found that good fences truly do make good neighbors because fortified enclosures also benefit livestock keepers who live nearby. Instead of dining on easier meals next-door and negatively impacting neighbors who don’t have fortified enclosures, predators seem to completely avoid neighborhoods when some corrals are built from chain-link fencing, which is more effective than traditional African boma fences made of thorny bushes.  

These surprising results are the first to demonstrate a beneficial spillover effect from a strategy to reduce conflict with large carnivores, which play an important role in ecosystems. Losing apex predators can cause ripple effects that disrupt the food web and impact environmental health. 

“Coexistence between humans and carnivores is a global challenge, and conflict resulting from carnivores attacking livestock is among the most important coexistence threats globally, including here in the Rocky Mountain West and Colorado specifically,” said Kevin Crooks, co-author of the study and director of the CSU Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence. “Our results provide important evidence of the effectiveness of proactive, non-lethal tools to prevent livestock predation by carnivores, benefiting not just the target household but potentially neighboring households as well.”   

Lead author Jonathan Salerno, an associate professor in CSU's Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources, said that while the intervention method studied is only applicable in limited contexts in the U.S. West, the need to understand the complex interactions among predators, people and conflict interventions is universal. 

"Understanding these dynamics can help guide effective use of conservation resources and support better outcomes for people, livestock and threatened species," he added. 

Chain-link linked to safety, savings 

In a previous study published in January, Salerno and his collaborators showed that chain-link corrals reduced predation on cattle, goats and sheep in an area surrounding Ruaha National Park in southern Tanzania, a critical landscape for large carnivore conservation. In this agropastoralist system, livestock are kept in fenced compounds at night, when predators are active, and are herded to community grazing lands during the day.   

The park and surrounding conservation areas protect 10% of the world’s African lions, among other carnivores, but each household bordering the park has about a 30% chance of losing one or more of its animals to predation each year, a significant economic loss for these small-scale farmers.

Conservation organization Lion Landscapes subsidized 75% of the cost of fortified enclosures for livestock keepers near the park who chose to implement the intervention and cover the remaining 25% of construction costs. A cost-benefit analysis published in the paper showed that after just five years, the benefits from preventing livestock deaths were three to seven times greater than the amounts paid by livestock owners. 

"The break-even point is anywhere from three months to two years, given that the loss of one cow is a substantial amount of wealth,” Salerno said. “So, you reduce the risk enough that the fortified enclosure actually pays for itself relatively quickly.” 

Using monthly data from 758 livestock-keeping households from 2010 to 2016, the first study also found that the chain-link corrals were 94% effective at reducing the risk of predation in the short term and 60% effective in the long term.  

Beneficial spillover effect

The new study, published March 6 in Conservation Letters, examined 25,000 monthly reports from livestock keepers and found that households neighboring those with chain-link corrals also reported fewer attacks on their livestock, the first time a beneficial spillover effect has been demonstrated. The study used data collected by Lion Landscapes and was funded by CSU’s School of Global Environmental Sustainability. 

“This research provides scientific evidence about the effectiveness of antipredation interventions, which not only reduce livestock losses but also have positive spillover effects, fostering coexistence between humans and carnivores,” said co-author Joseph Francis Kaduma, a research manager with Lion Landscapes. “By demonstrating how non-lethal methods can benefit both people and wildlife, the study offers practical conservation solutions that can be scaled to other regions facing similar conflicts worldwide.” 

Why are the carnivores staying away? 

While the study does not answer this question, Salerno said that it’s possible the neighborhoods with enclosures are just too much work for predators.  

“The neighborhood with three or four enclosures is going to represent more risk or more effort for the carnivore, because they know they can't pull livestock out of the fortified enclosures, though a few leopards will try with a goat or sheep,” he said. “It reduces the availability; the night-time livestock buffet is simply less accessible and attractive.” 

Why not fence the park? 

Like many national parks, Ruaha National Park is vast, and it’s not feasible to enclose it within a chain-link fence. Fencing the park also would have negative ecological consequences by isolating wildlife, and shutting people out would create even greater conflict between nearby communities and conservation interests, Salerno said. 

Case study for a global issue 

Lion Landscapes has long-term relationships with local livestock keepers and diligently tracked the data that supported these studies. Salerno said that having this kind of data from other places would help conservation organizations and wildlife managers find solutions to similar conflicts.   

“If we gather these data, we can understand what factors are contributing to predation events on a particular ranch, and by accounting for the complexity of the larger system, we can start to understand what methods are going to be effective,” he added.  

Livestock enclosures in the Ruaha–Rungwa landscape. (a) Aerial image of a traditional household compound, showing thornbush livestock corrals and houses (image extracted from Google Earth Pro). (b) Traditional enclosure at a permanent settlement. (c) Fortified enclosure at a permanent settlement. Photos by Lion Landscapes

Credit

Lion Landscapes

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Journal

Conservation Letters

DOI

10.1111/conl.13085 

Article Title

Beneficial Spillover Effects of Antipredation Interventions Support Human–Carnivore Coexistence

Article Publication Date

14-Mar-2025

 

International survey finds that support for climate interventions is tied to being hopeful and worried about climate change

New research reveals differences in how people feel about climate change in different parts of the world

Society for Risk Analysis

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A global survey of more than 30,000 people in 30 countries has revealed how people around the world feel about climate change, and how those emotions relate to perceptions of and support for climate interventions that could address the crisis. The new study is published in the journal Risk Analysis.

To investigate the intensity of “climate emotions” on a global scale and their intersection with perceptions of climate interventions, a team of researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria conducted an online survey in 19 different languages for adults in 30 countries. Responses were collected from August to December 2022. 

In their data analysis, the team mapped the intensity of five “climate emotions” -- fear, hope, anger, sadness and worry -- across the 30 countries. Clear differences in climate emotions emerged across the world. Here are some of the findings:
•    Among the 12 most hopeful countries about climate change, there were 11 developing and emerging economies of the Global South (including Nigeria, Kenya, India and Indonesia). The only country representing the Global North in this group was the United States. 
•    European countries ranked among the least hopeful -- including Germany, Austria, and Sweden. This is despite participants from these countries (and the Global North) reporting less direct experience with natural disasters and lower expected harm from climate change.
•    Anger and sadness were expressed most strongly by participants in three southern European countries: Spain, Italy, and Greece.
•    Participants in Brazil expressed the greatest degrees of both fear and worry with respect to climate change.

An important goal of the study was to explore the intersection between climate emotions and how people around the world feel about climate intervention technologies involving solar radiation modification (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). “In addition to types of climate action like mitigation and adaptation, climate intervention is receiving greater attention due to the greater evidence of climate disasters and insufficient pace of emissions reductions,” says Chad M. Baum, lead author of the study and Assistant Professor at the Development of Business Development and Technology at Aarhus University in Herning, Denmark. 

He and his colleagues examined the statistical relationship between the five climate emotions and support for 10 different climate intervention technologies, including afforestation, direct air capture, and stratospheric aerosol injection. 
Hope (expressed most strongly by respondents from the Global South) emerged as a key predictor of support for climate intervention, particularly for SRM approaches and novel forms of CDR, such as direct air capture. Being afraid was also positively related to support for climate-intervention technologies -- though with a smaller effect than being hopeful or worried. “Together with hope and worry, this suggests that fear, and its desire for protective action, is positively linked to support for more controversial forms of climate intervention,” says Baum. 

“Our results,” he adds, “illustrate both the divergence of climate emotions at a global level and, crucially, the potential consequences of not engaging with diverse perspectives on climate change -- and some proposed solutions -- in the Global South.”
 
About SRA  
The Society for Risk Analysis is a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, scholarly, international society that provides an open forum for all those interested in risk analysis. SRA was established in 1980. Since 1982, it has continuously published Risk Analysis: An International Journal, the leading scholarly journal in the field. For more information, visit www.sra.org.  

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Journal

Risk Analysis

Method of Research

Survey

Article Publication Date

15-Mar-2025