Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Despite its ubiquity, lightning remains a perplexing topic with various potential drivers that sometimes shows strange radioactive properties. Why, they don’t know—but maybe more studies of these superbolts will help out. The researchers cited evidence that, for some reason, the ocean seems to enhance lightning bolts’ energy. California Do Not Sell My Info The United Nation's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has just announced that the longest lightning strike on record was a 2007 bolt in Oklahoma that stretched 321 km (200 miles) - almost reaching from one side of the state to the other. This sounds logical to me; energy builds up but there is no high point (sea is a pretty flat surface) so it can’t/won’t discharge at normal energies and keeps building up to higher and higher energies. But none of these areas had many superbolts, according to the paper published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. Both records are detailed in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. There could be a lower risk—the lower the flash rate—but it’s not ‘no-risk.’”. A second extreme occurred in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France, on August 30, 2012. and lots and lots of energy gets released. So just how does a lightning bolt span 200 miles? . 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These extremes and others prompted the WMO to formally amend the definition of lightning from a “series of electrical processes taking place within one second” to a “series of electrical processes taking place continuously.”, It's also causing weather mavens to rethink lightning safety advice. The network of sensors waits for the electromagnetic radiation from lightning, and uses at least five of the 80+ stations to find where and when the bolt hit. 17th Annual Photo Contest Finalists Announced. The researchers picked out the bolts that were a thousand times more energetic than the average lightning strike for this analysis, carefully weeding out any potential erroneous data. That’s about 0.0005 percent of … Vote Now! And while you may associate the strongest thunderstorms with summertime near a coast, an analysis of lightning data found that superbolts are most likely to occur from November to February on the open ocean, far from the places where lightning occurs most often. 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