from the lightning's-flashing-across-the-sky dept.
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: 4, Funny) by rufty on Friday June 26 2020, @01:25PM (5 children)
Shocking!
(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]
(Score: 2) by BananaPhone on Friday June 26 2020, @01:51PM (8 children)
(no I have no proof)
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Friday June 26 2020, @03:07PM (6 children)
Certainly sounds plausible to me. That's an awfully big increase in a maximum record.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @04:02PM
Nah, lightning flashes in ancient times have regularly been this big. We just didn't have the technology to record them. And besides, I checked last night, and the entire sky was dark. This whole "lightning" thing must be a hoax.
And no, these two statements do not contradict each other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @05:04PM
We've been recording for a tiny blip of time. Even if you only consider the climate after the last glacial epoch, it's a blip. If you expand out further it's like we've observed one pixel on your monitor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @05:51PM
Nah, it was caused by all the mercury in the vaccines taken by Brazilians. Mercury conducts electricity, and it you have a large population of electrically-conductive people you'll have longer lightning bolts.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @08:21PM
I doubt this is related to climate change. I can't think of a mechanism that would cause the behavior of individual lightning flashes to change.
I think it's likely that the aggregate behavior of lightning could change in response to climate change. The obvious mechanism is changes in the frequency and location of thunderstorms, something that's probably already occurring. The other mechanism is that warming will change the temperature and humidity of the troposphere, which could affect both the vertical motions and the distribution of droplets and ice crystals inside thunderstorm clouds, therefore changing the electrification of the storms. If the atmosphere were to be more unstable due to more low-level moisture, that would cause air to rise faster in thunderstorm clouds, which certainly could change the electrification of storms.
I've actually worked with NLDN data from Vaisala. The sensors have improved quite a bit in recent years, but used to miss a larger percentage of flashes. The data files do contain some data about each flash like polarity, peak current, and multiplicity. But I've never seen the duration of the flash recorded in NLDN data, and I suspect that isn't recorded. The NLDN data have a single latitude and longitude assigned to each flash, so there isn't data on the length of the flash. They don't actually measure the altitude, either, so it's just a 2D point that's representative of the location of the flash. There are some regional 3D LMAs that provide more detailed information about lightning flashes, often for research purposes. The data collected by each of the LMAs probably depends on the hardware and software, so I don't know for sure if they measure the duration or length of flashes.
I suspect that we just haven't collected enough detailed data to observe flashes like these previously. And we haven't been collecting these data long enough to really identify any kind of climate signal, nor are the data really sufficient to identify any long-term trends. There have been significant improvements in the detection capabilities over the past decade, with upgrades to the NLDN hardware. Identifying trends in the data would require distinguishing trends due to equipment upgrades from any climate change signal, which I suspect is quite difficult to do.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday June 26 2020, @08:29PM (1 child)
This reminds me of some of the worlds depicted on ST:TNG. I seem to remember one episode about a horrible world with a lot of lightning, and a bunch of disembodied alien convicts living in the atmosphere. I guess that's what our planet will look like soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @08:43PM
You're thinking of Power Play [wikipedia.org]. There's also Galorndon Core in The Enemy [wikipedia.org], which is a similar planet, but in what I thought was a more interesting episode.
Hey, it could be worse. You could have a planet with winds up to 312 m/s and temperatures below absolute zero (-291 °C) [wikipedia.org]. The Royale also indicated that a proof to Fermat's Last Theorem remained elusive until the 24th century. In fact, a proof was discovered a few years after the episode was produced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2020, @04:27AM
Satellite based sensors capable of detecting these very large and long distance strikes haven't been around for very long yet. We will probably need at least another fifty to a hundred years of continuous recording to really know what qualifies as 'unusually big'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @04:48PM (4 children)
Megaflash - starring the usual 4th-rate actors. The next "Sharknado" series.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @05:18PM (3 children)
You can't outrun the light!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @06:09PM (2 children)
>> You can't outrun the light!
Explain Cherenkov radiation then.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @08:24PM
That's MegaFlash II - Cherenkov's revenge
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 27 2020, @05:42PM
(Score: 3, Funny) by cmdrklarg on Friday June 26 2020, @06:57PM
n/t
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @08:29PM (1 child)
Blitzortung [blitzortung.org] is a community-sourced lightning detection project that provides some real-time data. Not sure why the site isn't using https, but there's a real-time display and a historical archive going back a few years.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday June 26 2020, @09:24PM
Probably because there's nothing secret about the data at all, not even throwaway login info.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2020, @07:08AM
The signal for locust cloud to rise up and wage the ultimate do-or-die battle against the monkeys.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Saturday June 27 2020, @10:09AM
Now I can say, "I'll be back in a flash" and I'll have an extra 8.3 seconds to get back compared to before.