Scientists detect “ superbolt ” lightning strikes more powerfully than the entire US solar and wind power capacity – RT World News

In two separate studies of extreme lightning events, researchers were amazed at the sheer power of mother nature being unleashed much more regularly than previously thought.

So-called “superbolts” were first detected in the 1970s, although it was suspected that they only reached 100 times the standard brightness of typical lightning.

Now, however, using satellite observations, researchers at the United States Los Alamos National Laboratory have discovered far more than they bargained for to illuminate Earth’s skies.

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

A 2018 megaflash stretched about 700 kilometers (440 miles) into the sky. The long-lasting burst of 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 flashes recorded by orbital weather satellites every two milliseconds, looking for lightning events that glowed 100 times brighter than average.

They discovered about two million such events that meet the criteria, or about one in every 300 lightning events, over the 24-month span of their study.

Many of these superbolts broke with at least 100 gigawatts of power. This astounding display of power is contextualized by the fact that, in 2018, all U.S. solar panels and wind turbines produced a combined 163 gigawatts of power.

The authors warn, however, that they may actually have missed brighter but shorter flashes, as they only counted shots that lasted two milliseconds or longer.

“Using total energy to shield the brightest cases of lightning will miss short 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 superbolt activity, including in the central United States and the Rio de La Plata basin, which spans parts of Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. .

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

“Lightning even exceeded 3 terawatts of power, thousands of times stronger than normal lightning detected from space”, Peterson, who conducted both studies, said.

The most powerful hits detected emitted a whopping 350 gigawatts of power, while superbolts were found to be generated during rare positively charged cloud-to-ground events, unlike the more common negatively charged cloud-to-ground events which make up the vast majority of lightning strikes. .

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Understanding these immensely powerful events is critical to improving our understanding of our planet’s atmosphere. There are also several projects that explore the possibility of harnessing the power of lightning for use by humanity, but wielding superbolt with current technology is still a distant possibility.

A superbolt flash near South Africa in 1979 was initially thought to be an exploding nuclear bomb. Another that struck Newfoundland in 1978 left a mile-long scar of damage, including cracked trees, distorted television antennas, shattered electrical transformers, and even craters in its wake.

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