2022/01/25 by Michael Peterson, Timothy J. Lang, Timothy Logan +10 · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Engineering · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Atmospheric aerosols and clouds #Certification #Computer science #Duration (music) #Engineering #Environmental science #Flash (photography) #Geography #Law #Lightning (connector) #Lightning and Electromagnetic Phenomena #Meteorology #Operating system #Optics #Physics #Plant responses to elevated CO2 #Political science #Power (physics) #Reuse #Space (punctuation) #Waste management
paper · pdf · doi:10.1175/bams-d-21-0254.1
openalex publication_date 2022/01/25 · openalex created_date 2022/01/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Initial global extremes in lightning duration and horizontal distance were established in 2017 by an international panel of atmospheric lightning scientists and engineers assembled by the WMO. The subsequent launch of NOAA’s latest GOES-16/17 satellites with their Geostationary Lightning Mappers (GLMs) enabled extreme lightning to be monitored continuously over the western hemisphere up to 55⁰ latitude for the first time. Consequently, the former lightning extremes were more than doubled in 2019 to 709 km for distance and 16.730 s for duration. Continued detection and analysis of lightning “megaflashes” has now revealed two flashes that even exceed those 2019 records. As part of the ongoing work of the WMO in detection and documentation of global weather extremes, an international WMO evaluation committee was created to critically adjudicate these two GLM megaflash cases as new records for extreme lightning.