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With the proliferation of weather-monitoring satellite technologies researchers are better able to identify and quantify massive horizontal lightning discharges that can span areas hundreds of miles across (and spawn air-to-ground lightning strikes).
Such region-spanning discharges may help explain Fortean incidents in which a ground strike occurs without there being an active thunderstorm in sight.
FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/how-big-can-lightning-get.html
Such region-spanning discharges may help explain Fortean incidents in which a ground strike occurs without there being an active thunderstorm in sight.
There's much more explanation given in:How Big Can Lightning Get?
On Oct. 22, 2017, storm clouds gathering above the central United States released a flash of lightning so huge that it illuminated the skies above Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Horizontally spanning more than 310 miles (500 kilometers) across these three states, the jolt was so unprecedented that a group of researchers wrote a study about it, describing it as a "megaflash": It was one of the longest lightning flashes ever recorded.
Typically, regular lightning flashes measure between just 0.6 miles and 20 miles (1 and 20 km) in length. But as increasingly sophisticated mapping techniques have revealed, some truly colossal bolts are crackling above our heads. These recent discoveries raise an interesting question: How big can lightning actually get? And should we be worried about these atmospheric heavyweights? ...
... Vertically, the extent of a flash is limited by the height of a storm cloud, or the distance from the ground to its pinnacle — which is about 12 miles (20 km) at its highest. But horizontally, an extensive cloud system provides much more room to play with.
Back in 1956, a meteorologist named Myron Ligda demonstrated this when he used radar to detect the longest lightning flash anyone had ever recorded at that point: a bolt that spanned 60 miles (100 km). ...
Then in 2007, researchers broke the record by identifying a flash over the state of Oklahoma that measured 200 miles (321 km) long. The recent study by MacGorman and his colleagues knocked that number out of the park. The light emitted by this flash was so strong that it illuminated a ground area of 26,000 square miles (67,845 square kilometers), the researchers calculated. But even that flash has now been surpassed: Another recent study in the journal JGR Atmospheres described a flash spanning 418 miles (673 km). ...
"Such events can often lead to ground strikes far away from the main lightning activity in the convective core," ... "Someone on the ground could think the storm has passed, but be caught by surprise by one of these spatially extensive discharges seemingly from nowhere." ...
FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/how-big-can-lightning-get.html
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