Lightning is a common discharge phenomenon in nature, there are 100 lightning bolts on the earth every second, but usually only lightning can be seen in thunderstorm weather, and most of the lightning at this moment is hidden in the clouds, only a small part can be seen, and because we live on the surface of the earth, the vision under the clouds is not vast, so it is impossible to see its full picture when the lightning appears, usually the length of a lightning bolt can reach several kilometers, but the length of the giant lightning can reach hundreds of kilometers.
So how long can a bolt of lightning be? On February 1 of this year, the World Meteorological Organization announced that it had detected a 768-kilometer lightning bolt that appeared in the southern United States on April 29, 2020, spanning three states of Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, the longest lightning bolt ever detected.
The image above shows the monitoring data for the longest lightning bolt in the southern United States
This exceeds the distance from Beijing to Zhengzhou (692 kilometers), and the straight-line distance is equivalent to the distance from Beijing to Zhumadian, Fuyang, Bengbu, Yancheng, Yan'an, Sanmenxia, or the distance from Shanghai to Wuhan, Jinan, Zhengzhou and Quanzhou.
768 kilometers, in fact, is still a straight-line distance between the two ends of the lightning, but the lightning is meandering, and there are many branches, if you calculate the total length of the zigzag lightning and its branches, then the length of this lightning must be at least 10 times higher.
It is difficult to imagine that a lightning bolt can be connected so far, which requires a large enough live cloud, as well as a large enough voltage and a strong enough current, but nature can create such conditions, the current of the detected super lightning can reach 300,000 amperes, which is more than 10 times larger than the current output of all the three gorges generator sets at the same time, and the voltage can reach 1.36 billion volts, and the current world's highest UHV transmission line is the Yuheng-Weifang 1500 kV UHV AC line on the mainland, and its voltage is as high as 1500 kV , but the maximum voltage of lightning is thousands of times its.
How was the 768-kilometer-long Super Lightning discovered? WMO researchers have made measurements using meteorological satellites and a ground-based network of "lightning mapping arrays" (BLOs). This record-length lightning was preceded by a 709-kilometer lightning strike in southern Brazil on October 31, 2018, but this time it was nearly 60 kilometers longer than the previous record.
The picture above shows the monitoring data of the 709 km long Lightning Satellite in southern Brazil
The WMO also announced a record lightning bolt of 17.7 seconds in a thunderstorm in Uruguay and northern Argentina on June 18, 2020.
In the above figure, the left picture is the longest lightning released by the World Health Organization, and the right picture is the longest lightning.
Our common lightning usually lasts no more than a second, because lightning is mostly fleeting, and it is difficult to imagine a lightning bolt shining for 17.7 seconds, such a lightning bolt can release a huge amount of electrical energy, ionize the air and clouds in the area it passes, and produce a large amount of solid nitrogen to increase nutrients for plants.
Before this record-long lightning, there was also a 16.73-second giant lightning bolt in northern Argentina that appeared on March 4, 2019, and this lightning bolt extended the duration by 0.37 seconds, which also shows that northern Argentina is a place prone to long-term lightning.
The image above shows satellite monitoring data that lasted 16.73 seconds of lightning in northern Argentina
However, the maximum distance and maximum time of the lightning mentioned above are not the extreme values of lightning in these two aspects, and these records will continue to be refreshed as the means of observation continue to improve.
Resources:
"CCTV News" client February 1 article "768 km! The world's longest lightning record is set
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