Scientists detect ‘Superbolt’ lightning strikes that strike with more power than the entire solar and wind capacity of the United States – RT World News

In two separate studies of extreme lightning events, researchers were stunned by the sheer power of Mother Nature unleashed much more regularly than previously thought.

So-called “superbolts” were first detected in the 1970s, even though they were believed to reach only 100 times the standard brightness of a typical lightning strike.

Now, however, using satellite observations, researchers at the US National Laboratory in Los Alamos have discovered much more than they bargained for to light up Earth’s skies.

“It is important to understand these extreme events, because it tells us what lightning is capable of”, says atmospheric scientist Michael Peterson.

A 2018 mega-flash stretched some 700 kilometers (440 miles) into the sky. The long-lasting lightning also lasted nearly 17 seconds.

Peterson and his colleague Erin Lay analyzed two years of data collected by NASA’s Geostationary Lightning Mapper, which records lightning bolts recorded by orbital weather satellites every two milliseconds, looking for lightning events that shone 100 times brighter. stronger than average.

They discovered about two million such events that met the criteria, or about one in 300 lightning events, during the 24 months of their study.

Many of these superbolts cracked with at least 100 gigawatts of power. This astounding display of power is put into context by the fact that in 2018, all of America’s solar and wind panels combined produced 163 gigawatts of electricity.

The authors warn, however, that they may have missed out on brighter but shorter lightning bolts, as they only counted strikes that lasted two milliseconds or more.

“Using total energy to detect the brightest lightning cases will miss short-lived but extremely powerful optical pulses,” they write.

When the researchers then analyzed the data for strikes 1,000 times brighter than average, they focused on several hot spots of super-aerobatic activity, including in the central United States as well as the Basin. the Rio de La Plata, which spans parts of Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. .

Meanwhile, a second study that analyzed 12 years of data from the Fast On-Orbit Recording of Transient Events (FORTE) satellite counted super bolts emitting 100 gigawatts of power or more.

“A lightning strike even exceeded 3 terawatts of power – thousands of times stronger than ordinary lightning detected from space,” Peterson, who led the two studies, said.

The strongest strikes detected emitted a whopping 350 gigawatts of power while superbolts were shown to be generated during rare positively charged cloud-to-ground events, as opposed to the much more common negatively-charged cloud-to-ground events that make up the large one. majority of lightning strikes.

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Understanding these extremely powerful events is essential for improving our understanding of our planet’s atmosphere. There are also several projects exploring the possibility of harnessing the power of lightning for use by humanity, but the use of super bolts with current technology is still a distant possibility.

A super-aerobatic flash near South Africa in 1979 was first thought to be a nuclear bomb that exploded. Another that struck Newfoundland in 1978 left a mile-long scar of damage, including split trees, warped TV antennas, destroyed electrical transformers, and even craters in its wake.

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