E-Mail Irvine, Calif. -- In 2019, the National Weather Service in Alaska reported spotting the first-known lightning strikes within 300 miles of the North Pole. Lightning strikes are almost unheard of above the Arctic Circle, but scientists led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine have published new research in the journal Nature Climate Change detailing how Arctic lightning strikes stand to increase by about 100 percent over northern lands by the end of the century as the climate continues warming. "We projected how lightning in high-latitude boreal forests and Arctic tundra regions will change across North America and Eurasia," said Yang Chen, a research scientist in the UCI Department of Earth System Science who led the new work. "The size of the lightning response surprised us because expected changes at mid-latitudes are much smaller."