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Title: US Lightning Flash Was Longest On Record At 515 Miles

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/07/31/2247...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A 515-mile (829km)
lightning flash has set a new record as the longest ever identified. The
World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed the new world record for
the flash registered on October 22, 2017, over the Great Plains in the US. It
stretched from east Texas to near Kansas City, Missouri, roughly the distance
between Paris and Venice. The previous record of 768km was also recorded in
the Great Plains, a hotspot for severe thunderstorms, on April 29, 2020.
Since 2016, scientific advances in space-based mapping have allowed for
lightning flashes to be measured over a broader space, allowing these long
flashes to be recorded. This event was one of the first flashes to be
documented using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's latest
model of orbital satellite, known as a geostationary operational
environmental satellite. [...] The advances in technology have also allowed
for the recording of the greatest duration for a single lightning flash. The
record is a flash that lasted 17.1 seconds during a thunderstorm over Uruguay
and northern Argentina on June 18, 2020. The findings have been published in
the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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