scientist have detected arecord - breaking lightning boltthat was 321.1 kilometers ( 199.5 naut mi ) in duration , roughly the length between New York City and Washington D.C. It streak across the sky above Oklahoma back in 2007 , and the World Meteorological Organization ( WMO ) has justofficially recognizedit as the longest single flash lamp of lightning ever record .
At the same time , they also affirm another record . Striking over southern France in 2012 , a lightning deadbolt managed to have its connection between the ground and the welkin for a whopping 7.74 seconds . The average duration is just0.2 sec . The Oklahoma bolt itself was no squinch reddish blue , having lasted for an telling 5.7 second gear . unhappily , though , there ’s no imagery of video of either .
In any character , both lightning bolts were so prolonged that the WMO have changed their definition of what a lightning rap is . Originally , it was key as a “ series of electrical processes taking place within one second , ” but the last three intelligence have now been replaced by “ continuously ” .
It ’s not yet open how the strike over France was able to last about 39 times as long as the median bolt of lightning . To be fairish , it ’s shocking ( sorry ) how much science still does n’t have a go at it about what causes lightning in the first place . Despite there being just about 40 to 50 lightning strikes per minute on Earth , meteorologists do n’t have enough data yet to truly translate these iridescent phenomena .
The track of the long ever lightning bolt . Made using data from the enquiry . Tom Rourke / IFLScience
“ It is possible , indeed probably , that greater extreme can and have occurred , ” the novel report in theBulletin of the American Meteorological Societypoints out . It ’s all a affair of whether or not they ’ve been caught on photographic camera .
Both record - break-dance flash may have taken place in Mesoscale Convective Systems ( MCSs ) . These are a complex of nested thunderstorms that amplify each other on a weighing machine larger than individual thunderstorms , but not quite as much as seen within extratropical cyclone , hurricane - like swirlsthat take billet outside the tropical zone . It ’s possible that the most uttermost lightning occurs during MCSs .
mostly speaking , lightning occurs at altitudes where the temperature is below pee ’s freezing full stop . A mixture of hail , supercooled water droplets , and ice rink crystal exist at these heights , all with various electric charge . When an updraft hap , and these subatomic particle move around chaotically , a charge derivative appears , and a lightning bolt appear to transfer charge between two regions to balance this out .
The most common form of lightning strike by far are the negative cloud - to - undercoat flash types . As aleaderof negatively turn on particles surge towards the primer coat , the flat coat becomes comparatively positively charged .
This allows an upward stream of positive charge to emerge from tall , stretch social organization like skyscrapers or wind turbines . at last , the positive and minus flow fill about 50 meters ( 164 feet ) above ground .
This affiliated tour permit the far more energetic negative electric charge to fall back down towards the ground , and we see it as a lightning deadbolt . accord to the WMO , each deadbolt is at a temperature of nearly 30,000 ° C ( about 54,000 ° fluorine ) , and have a huge spike in local atmosphere pressure ( approximately 10 atm ’s deserving ) that we hear as nose drops .
A reflectivity mapping of the Oklahoma thunderbolt . The black area represents the highest reflectivity region , which some corresponds to the bolt itself . Artium Magister
This is all well - know , but there are some varieties of lightning we know very little about . Volcanic lightningin finicky is still highly mysterious , and it ’s not clear what causes it or even which part of the eruption it grow from .
Some lightning is even know to strike from the groundupwards , and on a certain meth gargantuan exoplanet , thunderstorms that overcompensate the integral planet can be so up-and-coming that we can notice them a ludicrous122 light - yr away .
