700-km Brazil 'megaflash' sets lightning record: UN:
The UN's weather agency announced Thursday the longest lightning bolt on record—a single flash in Brazil on October 31, 2018 that cut the sky across more than 700 kilometers.
That is equivalent to the distance between Boston and Washington DC in the United States, or between London and Basel, Switzerland, the World Meteorological Organization said in a statement.
WMO's committee of experts on weather and climate extremes also reported a new world record for the duration of a lightning flash, with a single flash that developed continuously over northern Argentina on March 4, 2019 lasting for a full 16.73 seconds.
The new "megaflash" records, which were verified with new satellite lightning imagery technology, were more than double the previous known record-holders, WMO said.
The previous record for the longest detected distance for a single lightning flash was 321 kilometers (199 miles), measured on June 20, 2007 in the US state of Oklahoma, WMO said.
The previous duration record was 7.74 seconds, measured on August 30, 2012 in southern France, it said.
I have several weather resources I like to reference. These two are interactive where you can scroll around and zoom in and out any place in the world. For real-time lightning strikes, check out: www.lightningmaps.org. For more general info earth.nullschool.net and be sure to play around with the settings (click the "gear" icon).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 26 2020, @04:41PM (4 children)
We got struck, hard, last night = killed a tree, wife and I "saw" ball lightning which seems to have been consistent with the magnetic pulse induced seizure hallucination variety you can read about in Wikipedia. Absolutely fragged the cable modem, welded some ethernet cables into a switch, two screens, three PCs, a PS3 and networking gear are among the casualties. Also converted a GFI receptacle into "instapop" - replaced it with a new one and it's fine now. All 4 Raspberry Pis survived...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @05:11PM
That is some weird shit and more people should store electronics in Faraday cages. Solid metal > mesh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @08:21PM
Thank god the fucking Raspberry Pis survived! Holy shit we were worried there for a bit. Don't do that to us man!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 26 2020, @08:39PM (1 child)
So you are posting from a Raspberry Pi right now?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 27 2020, @04:52PM
Could be, but no... 3/4 laptops in the house also survived. The main challenge until we get landline internet back is connectivity which right now is via Google Fi.
🌻🌻 [google.com]