US Lightning Flash Was Longest On Record At 515 Miles 29
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A 515-mile (829km) lightning flash has set a new record as the longest ever identified. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed the new world record for the flash registered on October 22, 2017, over the Great Plains in the US. It stretched from east Texas to near Kansas City, Missouri, roughly the distance between Paris and Venice. The previous record of 768km was also recorded in the Great Plains, a hotspot for severe thunderstorms, on April 29, 2020.
Since 2016, scientific advances in space-based mapping have allowed for lightning flashes to be measured over a broader space, allowing these long flashes to be recorded. This event was one of the first flashes to be documented using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's latest model of orbital satellite, known as a geostationary operational environmental satellite. [...] The advances in technology have also allowed for the recording of the greatest duration for a single lightning flash. The record is a flash that lasted 17.1 seconds during a thunderstorm over Uruguay and northern Argentina on June 18, 2020. The findings have been published in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Since 2016, scientific advances in space-based mapping have allowed for lightning flashes to be measured over a broader space, allowing these long flashes to be recorded. This event was one of the first flashes to be documented using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's latest model of orbital satellite, known as a geostationary operational environmental satellite. [...] The advances in technology have also allowed for the recording of the greatest duration for a single lightning flash. The record is a flash that lasted 17.1 seconds during a thunderstorm over Uruguay and northern Argentina on June 18, 2020. The findings have been published in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Very cool. Defunding when? (Score:1, Insightful)
Personally, I think it's cool we have some organization monitoring the weather and atmospheric phenomena like this.
Honest question: When are they going to be defunded by the current administration? Without looking, I'll bet they're on the chopping block.
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It has already happened. The recently passed "Big Beautiful Bill" carved a huge chunk out of NOAA's budget. [theguardian.com] Elections have consequences and all that jazz.
Tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis aren't political (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with reducing NOAA's budget is it also affects the tracking and monitoring of tornadoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis. Hurricane season is starting to ramp up with Labor Day as the historical busiest day for hurricanes. We just had a 8.8 earthquake that put millions of people on alert to monitor for tsunamis which luckily didn't cause much damage this time.
Dismantling the agency responsible for monitoring and warning of huge natural disasters just because they also research weather and climate change is very short sighted. Relying on politicians to guess damage predictions with sharpie markers will leave thousands in danger. Tornadoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis are no joke. I've sheltered through two hurricanes and they are scary as hell and devastating. Advanced warning is what keeps people safe.
NOAA Tsunami center [tsunami.gov]
NOAA Hurricane center [noaa.gov]
NOAA Severe weather center [noaa.gov]
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The problem with reducing NOAA's budget is it also affects the tracking and monitoring of tornadoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis
Yeah. I guess the logical thing to do at this point is for NOAA to change all weather products except alerts and warnings to Paid access.
By that I mean: Instead of releasing all the routine weather forecasting data for free into the public domain - Paywall everything and restrict redistribution under copyright - News networks should now have to pay based on their viewership for acce
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we could recognize that the American taxpayers have already paid for this data, and so should have free
No.. I mean that's not how it works. The study of weather is a continuing service Taxpayers cannot make a one-time payment for - 10 Billion to NOAA here and there does not buy you real-time forecast data forever. This requires continual continued work, infrastructure, and expenses to continue providing any kind of useful predictions - the environment is ever changing and constant data gathering and resea
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I specifically meant that the value of NOAA's data and services, each year, well exceeds the annual cost to taxpayers.
Sure it's probably true that overall value of NOAA's services provide more value than the worth of the funds allocated to them. Of course you can't force someone to agree to spend money; even if it's a small amount of money, and the benefit of spending it is obviously worth 1000x the cost -- it is possible that for some reason they choose to disregard that value or that deal and priori
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The part of all this that brings me joy is watching red states get denied FEMA funds when they get royally fucked by a tornado. https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com]
Your stated voted for it so I don't want to hear any crying.
Re:Very cool. Defunding when? (Score:4, Insightful)
Meanwhile, the Dept of Defense has their own weather satellites, and recently stopped sharing their data with NOAA [3 [npr.org]] [4 [columbia.edu]] [5 [militarytimes.com]]. DoD will still be collecting the data; they're just not sharing it, because...reasons. Military good, eggheads bad?
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I came into this chat to see how many posts I would have to look at before I found someone bitching about the current govt.
I didn't expect it to be the very FIRST post. You have exceeded expectations. Congratulations!
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Thank you.
If we deny it, then it won't happen. (Score:1)
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Our lightning is Yuge, the biggest, the best, the most impressive lightning. Other lightning is dwarfed by our great American lightning.
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Will this happen again? (Score:3)
How can it happen? (Score:2)
515 miles way over the horizon so there's no way charge in a cloud can feel the potential difference somewhere that far away so was this perhaps a multiple cascade of bolts through the storm clouds?
Re:How can it happen? (Score:5, Informative)
A 515-mile lightning flash is possible because it occurred within a massive thunderstorm system, called a mesoscale convective system (MCS), stretching across multiple states. Instead of striking the ground, the lightning traveled horizontally through the upper cloud layers—typically 8 to 12 miles above the surface—where the Earth's curvature is less of a barrier. At that altitude, the horizon extends far enough for lightning to propagate through charged regions in the clouds over hundreds of miles. These rare “megaflashes” are made possible by the right atmospheric conditions and were only recently measurable using satellite lightning detectors like NOAA's GOES-16.
(Yes, I used ChatGPT. Still interesting stuff.)
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Yes, is interesting. Makes me wonder how large lightning can be in the gas giants.
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I was wondering the same. My very rusty, and beginner-at-best knowledge of lightning is that you get static charge in the cloud, some air ionisation at ground level, and then that makes a path for lighting to travel from cloud to ground. Lighting tends not to flash in exactly straight lines because of air movement and differences in the path it finds. I'm not clear how lightning, which can only be, what a couple of kilometers up could travel many times that distance sideways before finding ground.
Anyone kno
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The Earth's magnetic field is weakening which is measurable by the accelerating traversal of the magnetic poles. That's why a relatively small CME last year caused the same Northern Lights all the way down to Hawaii as the Carrington Event which was 10x stronger. The beauty is unquestionable but the impacts will cause us difficulty.
There was a recent solar storm which ionized the atmosphere more than we are used to as "normal" in our recent history, which sets up the conditions for lightning to travel fur
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This happens every 6000 years or so and we're right on schedule but we're really unprepared to handle it.
There is no "schedule". Full magnetic pole reversals have been shown to be random events with an average interval of 450,000 years (183 reversals in 83 million years) with a mean of 300,000 years. As you may surmise this means that there are some very long intervals, with most being shorter. The last one occurred about 740,000 years ago, but is not the longest (yet) of the last 83 million years. In this "modern" reversal period there have been 10 reversal intervals longer than the current one, with the long
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Lightning doesn't take a straight path to ground. It sends out little "feelers" - basically it ionizes the air as a fork, feeling for a potential difference. One of the forks might find a larger potential difference and then a new feeler will form based off the old feeler, and the process repeats until it runs in
Some might say (Score:4, Funny)
It was a flash in the panhandle.
Thanks, I'll be here til Thursday. Oh wait, it's Friday. Don't eat the veal, it's gone bad.
Probaly Less rare Than We Know (Score:2)
Given the difficulty in observing and measuring such an event, it seems likely that this event is far more common than we are aware.