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World record 477-mile-long lightning ‘megaflash’ confirmed over U.S.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoThat first animation is unclear to me. Is that blue area all lightning? That lasts a lot longer than 10 seconds (or those clouds are really getting a shift on).
- jagged-chisel 4y agoIt’s not a single lightning event. It’s all the different lightning strikes throughout the storm.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoSeems hard to conclude the caption from that image, then. It's like looking at a long exposure of a kid waving a sparkler and estimating that the sparkler is 6 feet long. I don't doubt there was a megaflash, but I don't think that image actually demonstrates it fully.
- lazyier 4y agoThat isn't a timelapse photo. It's a picture of actual lightening. It is something that actually lasts for a long time. It must of been nuts to the people under it. Just continuous thunder for an extended period of time.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoThe animation, not the static image, covers clouds moving from North Texas to South Texas. That must cover hours, and each frame seems to be a merge between many flashes. The static image below that, of the record duration flash from South America, shows what does look like a single dendritic lightning flash.
- jagged-chisel 4y agoI assume one of those frames includes the megaflash. But they didn’t tell us which.
- Sakos 4y agohttps://youtu.be/4J8NJJ4n3Zw https://youtu.be/4J8NJJ4n3Zw This seems to be a decent example. It looks quite impressive.
- blakesterz 4y agoThis Post story is from this article. There's other nice images and stuff in the real source here: New WMO Certified Megaflash Lightning Extremes for Flash Distance and Duration Recorded from Space https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/103/5/BAMS-D-21-0254.1.xml?rskey=TKAeaX&result=1 https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/103/5/BAMS-D...
- lnwlebjel 4y ago"the longest WMO-recognized lightning flash is the single stratiform flash that covered a horizontal distance of 768 ± 8 km (467.2 ± 5 mi) across parts of the southern United States on 29 April 2020. The greatest WMO-recognized duration for a single lightning flash is 17.102 ± 0.002 s from the flash that developed continuously through the stratiform region of a thunderstorm over Uruguay and northern Argentina on 18 June 2020" Wow!
- pimlottc 4y agoThis is great but unfortunately it's not very mobile friendly, the WP article is better for that.
- echelon 4y agoI almost swear I heard and distinctly remember this event. I live in Atlanta, and that very spring I recall hearing a single thunderclap that echoed as if from another dimension. It was loud, ethereal, bellowing, deeply reverberated like nothing I've ever heard before. I then saw several /r/atlanta posts that pointed out the same phenomena. (I'll try to dig these up in Google and link them.) When I mentioned it to my coworkers -- it was that remarkable -- they thought I was crazy. My proposed hypothesis at the time was that lack of pollution in the air due to pandemic shutdowns had changed the particulate matter in the atmosphere, changing reverberation physics. But that was stupid, and my coworkers just nodded it off. If I can corroborate the timeline, this is pretty neat.
- xeromal 4y agoGrowing up in GA, the thunderstorms are something to behold. I remember in the 90s when I was a kid experiencing a clap of lightning so strong that it knocked all the nicknacks and candles off the fireplace hearth (?). It was nuts.
- secondcoming 4y agoI had that experience last year in Scotland when thundersnow happened. It was the loudest thing I've ever heard. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-55184493 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-5... (the audio doesn't do it justice)
- nomilk 4y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20220203191307/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/01/31/world-record-lightning-megaflash-us/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220203191307/https://www.washi...
- soheil 4y agoHow many homes could this power for one day?
- Maursault 4y agoThe energy involved is reasonably modest, on the order of 108J, equivalent to about 30kWh. An average household these days eats a little under 30kWh (which is a lot, by the way, 5 times more than about 3 decades ago). A lightning discharge would supply a home for maybe a day (these days, or maybe 8-15 homes for a day in 1965). With thousands of discharges, that'd neatly be thousands of homes... for a day.
- virgildotcodes 4y agoIs this right? According to google, average lightning bolt is 10^8 joules = ~277 kWh, so closer to 9 homes?
- Gracana 4y agoCan't be right at all. Photo flash capacitors store hundreds of joules, and if you short them out all you get is a fairly exciting *pow*. Lightning strikes light trees on fire, melt sand, vaporize metal..
- virgildotcodes 4y agoI think he meant 10^8 instead of 108.
- Gracana 4y agoOh! Of course.
- chrismorgan 4y ago10⁸ J = 27.7̅ kWh
- iJohnDoe 4y agoAre some of these events happening a sign of Day After Tomorrow heading our way? It’s seems like we’ve had reports of record temps. All the drought stories. The recent Lake Powell story. Other supply issues. Baby Formula shortages. These are classic headlines where all the signs are there, but are only obvious when looking back in time that these were classic signs humanity should have noticed. My examples aren’t only for extreme weather. More so that we’re not heading in the right direction and we only seem to really notice once it’s too late.
- lazide 4y agoThis stuff is always going on somewhere, you’re just primed to notice it more than before.
- harry8 4y agoThat's a very reasonable thing to consider. Dunno about you but I've been primed to notice it for a couple of decades. I used to rationalize it in a similar way by noting that sending video of extreme weather to show on the news had become increasingly fast, easy & cheap so we hear of more of it. That hasn't changed much for a long time now and there does seem to be a lot more extreme weather about for the past 5 years so. How to quantify it to be sure is another question.
- heywoodlh 4y agoYeah, if we couldn't observe it before effectively it seems like it would be tough to nail it down just to climate change. I would be super interested to see some data that correlates the two, though.
- jrockway 4y agoThis is probably not the end of the world. For this particular event, we have the best lightning observability in human history right now. So it's likely that once-rare events become more common now that we are watching. The space-based lightning detector (GLM) launched in 2016 (GOES-16), for example. Before that, we didn't have this kind of real-time lightning information. (Random aside: you can look at the data here: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/conus_band.php?sat=G16&band=EXTENT3&length=12&dim=1 https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/conus_band.php?sat=G16.... My favorite "was that thunder last night" answer.) Climate change and supply change problems caused by the pandemic are both real things. It's likely that humanity can survive drought, record temperatures, large lightning storms, and baby formula shortage. I think it's funny that you specifically mention baby formula; humans can produce milk for their babies and if shit gets really bad, that will probably keep working.
- blenderdt 4y ago~768km
- legohead 4y agoI grew up in Oklahoma and have seen my fair share of tornados and thunderstorms. But there was one in particular that I remember from 20+ years ago, and haven't experienced the like since. We had a tornado warning at work and we went outside to check the danger (if we should head to shelter). It was night, and it was calm outside, but the sky started to light up with lightning nonstop for what seemed like minutes. All around us, in every direction. Most of us just froze and stared up at the sky in silence. To shock a dozen Oklahomans into silence is quite something. I don't know if it was a megaflash, I've never heard that term before, but it was something.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoThat is the second strangest report of lightning phenomena I've ever heard. Sounds almost too fantastic to be true but I guess it's confirmed to be possible now.
- dboreham 4y agoI have experienced something similar in Montana, only seen one time. This was late into the night, during a severe thunderstorm. The storm woke me up. Looking out the window, lightning seemed to be continuous, for at least a couple of minutes. Like a xenon strobe light with the frequency sufficiently high to appear persistent to the human visual system. It looked like an alien abduction scene -- the outside landscape appeared to be illuminated as brightly as daylight.
- jimt1234 4y agoI had lighting strike a telephone pole about 30 feet from me when I was a kid in Missouri. It was like someone sticking a camera flash close to my eyes and pressing the button. I didn't really feel anything else, just temporary blindness. And honestly, I wasn't really scared; it all happened so fast.
- dataflow 4y agoIf you don't mind - how long was the temporary blindness roughly? And I assume your eyesight went back to normal eventually, or did you have any lasting effects?
- sjnu 4y ago"Three simultaneous lightning bolts strike ground" Funny how the waves are always extra blurry when that happens.
- dTal 4y agoYou're implying that this is a mislabeled long exposure photograph. The fact that you can see distinct ripples at all shows the exposure time was less than a second. I think it's fair to call three lightning strikes within a second of each other "simultaneous".
- dTal 4y agoupdate: I downloaded the original image. The EXIF data indicates the exposure time was 5 seconds. Apologies for the inaccurate assertion. URL: https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/DZ3EE5NABZBA5MKEKIWJTPJEUU.jpg https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
- Terry_Roll 4y agoThis planet is sounding more hostile than LV-426.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ohiovr 4y agoFor as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
- madduci 4y agoImagine if one day humans could catch and store that huge power and reuse it afterwards.
- 0_____0 4y agoPrior Art: Brown, E.; McFly, M. (1985). Energy Harvesting of Atmosphere-Earth Electrostatic Discharge in Spatiotemporal Displacement Research
- dotancohen 4y ago1955. In 1985 they had access to Libyan plutonium. The 1955 lightning experiments were a modification to the earlier 1985 plutonium-powered equipment.
- saalweachter 4y agoEh, lightning bolts are impressive on the scale of individuals but not on the scale of civilizations. The standard figure for the standard lightning bolt is 1 billion joules, or about 250 kWh. If we assume this lightning bolt was a million times bigger, that's 250 GWh, which is a big number, but like 1/500th the annual crypto usage. Meanwhile, there are about 1.4 billion lightning strikes per year, so the total lightning energy is about 400 TWh/year. That's nothing to sneeze at, about 40% of China's annual electricity usage. But to harvest it you need a global system to perfectly capture every joule from every bolt (or more likely, bleed it off before the bolt would form). Assuming lightning strikes are equally likely over land and sea, you lose 70% of your energy right there -- now your peak harvest is 150 TWh. If you have a million installations scattered around the world -- each one harvesting the lightning-energy from about 150 sq km, that's 150 MWh/year, or about 17 kilowatts per installation -- and once you start adding losses and inefficiency you're probably lucky to get 1 kW.
- dboreham 4y agoIsn't this what wind power generators are doing?
- intsunny 4y agoI feel sorry for all the animals out there that are terrified of the sounds produced by lightning.
- intsunny 4y agoHow on earth did this get downvoted? As a dog owner, I know how terrifying lightning is for dogs. I can only imagine how terrifying it is for other animals in the wild.
- Dorothy014 4y ago[dead]