ESSIC/CISESS scientist Daile Zhang took the lead and organized the 2024 International Lightning Safety Day (ILSD) Event on June 28, 2024. The ILSD event serves as an annual virtual platform dedicated to the discussion of lightning safety strategies, educational initiatives, technological advancements, methodologies, progress, and challenges from around the world. With participants from over 25 countries spanning North and South Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, this event aims to foster global collaboration in lightning safety.
This year, the meeting featured the WMO scientist Heikki Pohjola as the keynote speaker. He discussed the WMO early warnings initiative and the lightning disaster and preparedness from the WMO perspective. The meeting also featured 16 speakers from 11 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and North/South Americas, in addition to a panel discussion on Implementation of International Standards in Developing Countries. The speakers are lightning scientists, engineers at universities, private companies, government agencies or meteorological organizations, and college students.
It is the first time that the ILSD meeting was held on zoom (Fig. 1) and live streamed on Youtube (Fig. 2). There were around 60 participants on zoom and around 15 on the live stream. It is also the first time that a live session with the local participants at their own in-person lightning safety events. Local kids and adults in Brazil joined the meeting and greeted with the participants from their country (Fig. 3).
Two UMD undergraduate students Isabella Sanford (Junior, Astronomy and Physics) and Parthiv Deb (Junior, Information Science) presented at the ILSD (Fig. 4). Their presentation is titled “Preliminary Results of the African Lightning Injury Reports Database.” This is the largest and publicly available database of the lightning casualties in 41 African countries.
