Friday, April 29, 2005

sheet vs watchamacallit lightning

I was having a conversation one day about lightning (don't ask me why, just accept).

and I said that Singapore had one of the highest rates of lightning strikes (rumour has it as the most- even the Singaporew Science Centre says so) in the world. Something to even out the whole injustice of being impervious to most natural disasters in our region. (You name it, we don't have it)

We don't have floods (our roads, storm drains and general infrastructure are simply too efficient), earthquakes (general swaying, nary a glass broken), volcanoes (closest one is in Indonesia, or perhaps Lake Tahoe), gales, freak snowstorms, and of course, NO TSUNAMIS.

WE ARE BLESSED.


well, except for the lightning.

and we don't really care about it either, because Singapore's power has surge protectors built into the system and our engineers are all trained on lightning in compulsory modules.

So this guy (I'm pretty sure it was a guy, can't remember who, but it was a guy) started going on about how because it rains so much in Singapore it can't be that big a lightning strike since those huge ones only come about in storms.

I guess he didn't realise that in Singapore, every "rain" is a storm.

I remember arriving in Australia, hearing people comment on it 'raining cats and dogs' and me looking out and thinking this was drizzle status.

Well, it would have been drizzle status by Singaporean standards anyway. A "big rain" (as we call it) is when you can't see the car in front of you when you're driving.

Anyway, he didn't believe me when I said I'm pretty sure they were big and enough to kill people because I'd mentioned they were yellowish in colour.

"Those big lightning strikes are blue. Yellowish lightning is sheet lightning. Small kitchy stuff"

I don't know dude, but here's proof.





Yellow, and BIG.

and yes, it's not a one off. Here's more.

and no, I don't know why our skyline looks so puny either.