When my colleague Professor Tom Gill at University of Texas at El Paso alerted me to a recent study noting that cargo ships may be creating more lightning, my first reaction was that I wasn’t surprised at all. Though this may be a surprising finding to many scientists and the public, I have been conducting research for over two decades on how cities affect rainfall, storms, and lightning. As I read the paper, it was apparent to me that some of the same physical processes were at play with the cargo ship — lightning relationships. So how does a cargo ship create lightning?