Giant lightning flash spanning three states sets a new record
Satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recorded a record-breaking lightning flash that spanned three states near the start of the pandemic, the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced on Tuesday.
The megaflash covered a horizontal distance of 768 ± 8 km on April 29, 2020 - 60 kilometres longer than the previous record set over Brazil on October 31, 2018.
In a tweet, the WMO showed the length of the flash over a map, with it stretching over Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
In the same statement, the WMO certified another record-breaking megaflash, occurring on June 18, 2020, over Uruguay and northern Argentina. The agency says it was the longest duration for a single lightning flash at 17.102 ± 0.002 seconds, topping the pervious record of 16.73 seconds over Argentina on March 4, 2019.
The WMO says it "maintains official records of the world, hemispheric and regional extreme records associated with a number of specific types of weather." Ground-based Lightning Mapping Array (LMA) networks help analyze record-breaking flashes - but scientists say there is an upper limit for the scale of lightning that an LMA can observe.
Tracking megaflashes beyond that limit would require technology with a larger vantage point, like the space-based satellites that are also used to study lightning.
"Lightning is a surprisingly elusive and complex natural phenomenon for the impact that it has on our daily lives. We are now at a place where we have excellent measurements of its many facets, which allow us to discover surprising new aspects of its behaviour," Michael J. Peterson, the lead author on the study detailing the findings, said.
RELATED: HERE'S WHY LIGHTNING IS SO DANGEROUS
"Now that we have a robust record of these monster flashes, we can begin to understand how they occur and appreciate the disproportionate impact that they have.”
According to the National Weather Service (NWS), lightning is a significant cause of storm-related deaths in the U.S., with strikes causing several potential complications including heart attacks or irreversible brain damage.
NWS data taken between 1989 and 2018 found an average of 43 lightning fatalities per year state-side - but between 2009 and 2018, the number has dropped, sitting at around 27 annual deaths. Lightning kills about 10 per cent of the people it strikes, the agency says.
It also isn't uncommon for livestock to be killed by lightning, due to outdoor enclosures. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that lightning is responsible for up to 80 per cent of all accidental livestock deaths.
