A ray that in the fall of 2017 showed in the skies of Texas to Kansas officially hit the world record of “lightning lightning” that there is record: over 800 km.
During a large storm, in October 2017, a colossal discharge of electricity served by the great plains of North America through 830 kilometers – A distance that surpassed the previous record in 61 kilometers.
This distance is close to the one that separates Lisbon, at the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, Barcelona, in the northwest end: the lightning could have crossed the peninsula Les Lés has led.
“This is the type of phenomenon we call ray Megaflashand we are just now discovering the mechanisms of how and why it happens, ”he says Randy CervenyGeographic Scientist at the State University of Arizona and the World Meteorological Organization in OMM.
“It is likely that there are even greater extremesand let us be able to observe them as high quality ray measurements accumulate over time, ”adds Cerveny.
The radius is one of Earth’s most impressive phenomena. It occurs when turbulent conditions in the atmosphere shake particles, rubbing them to generate load. Eventually, so much load accumulates that You have to go somewhereproducing a discharge of millions of volts through the sky.
The radius with the largest horizontal distance previously known was recorded on April 29, 2020, when a megaflash cloud-to-none covered a distance from 768 kilometers Through parts of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Animation based on the longest lightning data in the world
These two records were detected with geostationary meteorological satellites GOES-16 e GOES-17 From the North American Ocean Agency, which are equipped with geostationary ray mapping (GLMs) that continually monitor the sky in search of extreme rays.
The Goes-16 was launched in late 2016, and managed to record the giant storm of October 2017, but o Megaflash had not been identifiedexplains the.
Recently, a team led by Michael Petersonatmospheric scientist at the Severe Storm Research Center of the Georgia Institute of Technology, revisited the data at the time collected, and identified the phenomenon.
The team’s work was presented in a published on Thursday in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Most rays are relatively smallless than 16 kilometers long, and tend to expand vertically. But some travel horizontally through the cloudsand if the cloud complex is particularly large, can give rise to giant rays.
Anything with More than 100 kilometers length is considered a Megaflash – whose identification is a thorough work, which involves gathering satellite and terrestrial data to rebuild the extent of the event in three dimensions.
This approach helps to determine that o Megaflash It’s a single discharge of a radius, as well as to measure how big it is. As the discharge is often, at least partially, obscured by clouds, it is easy to lose these Megaflashes.
No coincidence that both megaflashes occurred on the large plains. This region is a important focus for storms of the convective system of mesescala, which are more conducive to megaflas.
Therefore, if the record is broken in the future – which is a strong possibility – it will probably be in the same region.
