Scientists are beginning to understand what kind of thunderstorm produces so-called megaflashes of lightning that stretch more than 60 miles
A scientist on the hunt for extraordinarily long lightning bolts has discovered that the storms capable of producing these so-called megaflashes—which can strike without warning under a clear blue sky—tend to be long-lived and travel great distances.
Peterson has long been studying individual megaflashes, but he wanted to try to understand the phenomenon more generally. Key to that endeavor was a satellite called GOES-16, which has watched over the eastern Americas for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since the end of 2017. GOES-16 carries an instrument called the Geostationary Lightning Mapper , which is designed to look for flashes of light across a huge swath of Earth.
By analyzing the GOES-16 data, Peterson found that these storms tend to be born in what scientists call a mesoscale convective system, or MCS. “It’s basically a bunch of thunderstorms that congeal into either a line that stretches for hundreds of miles—or what we call a ‘blob,’” says Timothy Logan, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University, who was not involved in the new research.
“One of the highlights of the study is that the author created a new algorithm for identifying those large thunderstorms that produce megaflashes and studied some of the overall features of these thunderstorms,” says Daile Zhang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the new research. “It’s one of the first such studies to my knowledge.”
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