A new long-light record was validated Thursday by the World Meteorological Organization (OMM) and established 829 kilometers in the Grande Plains area in the United States.
This mega lightning was observed on October 22, 2017, during a large -scale thunderstorm episode. “Extending from eastern Texas to the surroundings of Kansas City, he covered an equivalent distance to that which separates the European cities from Paris and Venice (or Montreal and Wildwood, editor’s note),” said the OMM in a press release.
A committee of 11 experts based in the United States, Brazil, Germany, Spain, Nepal and Israel has certified the new record.
The previous record (768 km), also observed in the United States, took place between Mississippi and Texas on April 29, 2020, and was certified in 2022. These records have an error margin of more or less 8 km.
Lightning distinguished Thursday “had not been spotted during the initial storm analysis in 2017, but was discovered during a re-evaluation of it,” said the OMM.
This episode had been “one of the first thunderstorms during which the brand new exploitation geostationary satellite for the study of the environment (GOES-16) of the American administration for the oceans and the atmosphere (NOAA) collected data on” lightning mega “, that is to say stormy discharges whose spatiotemporal length is extreme”, added the OMM.
For the United Nations Meteorological Agency, such mega lightning underlines the power of lightning and its dangerousness.
“Lightning can travel very long distances far from the original storm,” said Randall Cerveny, OMM rapporteur for weather and climatic extremes at AFP. “This is why some people speak of a” blue lightning “, a flash that seems to arise from a clear sky”.
Source of wonder and major danger
Professor of geographic sciences at the Arizona State University, Mr. Cerveny created the global archives of the weather and climatic extremes of the WMO in 2007.
They record global temperature records, pressure, precipitation, hail, aridity, wind, lightning and mortality linked to meteorological phenomena.
The cartography of satellite lightning has been operational since 2016 only, too short to determine patterns or trends in terms of intensity, location or frequency. “Give us more than a decade of data and we can start to approach this issue,” Cerveny told AFP.
Michael J. Peterson, from the Research Center on violent storms in the United States, said that as data will expand, “we will be able to observe even the most rare lightning types on earth, and to study the wide impacts of lightning on society”.
OMM pleads so that the whole planet is covered by early alarm systems, which cover all dangerous weather events.
“Lightning is a source of wonder but also a major danger that costs many lives around the world each year,” said Celeste Saulo, the OMM chef.
According to record figures linked to lightning and validated by the OMM, the longest duration of a lightning is 17.102 seconds (June 18, 2020, Uruguay-Nord de Argentina), the deadliest direct lightning killed 21 people sheltered in a hut (1975, Zimbabwe) and the most devastating indirect impact An impact on a deposit, killing 469 people (1994, Dronka in Egypt).
