© MICHAEL PETERSON, LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORYA thunderstorm looms over southern Brazil and Uruguay in this computer-rendered view. The lightning in this image is around 160 miles long, roughly a third the size of the newly reported record-breaking flash.
The spidery streak is just one of many new lightning discoveries found in often overlooked satellite dataONE EVENING WHILE working, Michael Peterson found himself staring at an enormous spider. But Peterson, a remote sensing scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, wasn't looking at a critter of the eight-legged variety. Instead the form crawling across his screen was a monstrous flash of so-called spider lightning — a twisting network of light stretching hundreds of miles across stormy skies.
"I was just blown away," he says.
His analysis revealed two record-breaking lightning flashes, the longest by length and by duration. One stretched over Brazil some 418 miles from tip to tail — slightly longer than Kansas is across. The second lit up skies for 13.5 seconds over the central United States. A third lightning flash over the southern United States sprawled some 44,400 square miles — nearly the area of Ohio. (Official data aren't kept for the flash with the largest area, so it's not possible to determine if it set a record.)
The
previous record-holding flashes "called into question our typical view of lightning," Peterson says.
But these latest mega-flashes "are now essentially pushing the boundary further for what lightning can be."
Comment: Earlier this month rare lightning strikes were detected near the North Pole. A couple of weeks ago record lightning strikes were reported in Iceland.
In March this year an anomalous lightning storm hit Southern California producing more than 1,200 bursts in five minutes. In December 2018 the sky over New York City lit up with mysterious blue light.
Could the base level electric charge in the atmosphere be changing? See also:
- Changing atmosphere: Red sprites and a blue jet seen above Europe's stormy skies
- Electric universe: Lightning strength and frequency increasing
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