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WEATHER REPORT
700-km Brazil 'megaflash' sets lightning record: UN
by Staff Writers
Geneva (AFP) June 25, 2020

Lightning kills at least 107 in India monsoon
Patna, India (AFP) June 25, 2020 - At least 107 people died from lightning strikes in northern and eastern India Thursday, officials said, during the early stages of the annual monsoon season.

Some 83 people were killed in the impoverished eastern state of Bihar after being struck by lightning, and another 24 died in northern Uttar Pradesh state.

Dozens more were injured, officials said.

Lightning strikes during the June-September annual monsoon are fairly common in India.

But Bihar's Disaster Management Minister Lakshmeshwar Rai told AFP this was one of the highest daily tolls from lightning the state had recorded in recent years.

More than half of the deaths were from the flood-prone northern and eastern districts of Bihar, he added.

Rai warned the death toll could rise further as his government was still waiting on casualty reports from the interior parts of the state.

Heavy rain is forecast to hit Bihar on Friday and Saturday, according to the local India Meteorological Department office.

In neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, most of the deaths were reported in Deoria district close to the Nepal border, and the holy city of Prayagraj, authorities said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi late Thursday tweeted his condolences to the victims' families, adding that both state governments were carrying out urgent relief work.

More than 2,300 people were killed by lightning in India in 2018 according to the National Crime Records Bureau, the most recent figures available.

The monsoon is crucial to replenishing water supplies in South Asia, but also causes widespread death and destruction across the region each year.

The UN's weather agency announced Thursday the longest lightning bolt on record -- a single flash in Brazil on October 31, 2018 that cut the sky across more than 700 kilometres.

That is equivalent to the distance between Boston and Washington DC in the United States, or between London and Basel, Switzerland, the World Meteorological Organization said in a statement.

WMO's committee of experts on weather and climate extremes also reported a new world record for the duration of a lightning flash, with a single flash that developed continuously over northern Argentina on March 4, 2019 lasting for a full 16.73 seconds.

The new "megaflash" records, which were verified with new satellite lightning imagery technology, were more than double the previous known record-holders, WMO said.

The previous record for the longest detected distance for a single lightning flash was 321 kilometres (199 miles), measured on June 20, 2007 in the US state of Oklahoma, WMO said.

The previous duration record was 7.74 seconds, measured on August 30, 2012 in southern France, it said.

- 'Extraordinary records' -

The new measurements reveal "extraordinary records from single lightning flash events," Randall Cerveny, the chief rapporteur in the WMO expert committee, said in the statement.

"It is likely that even greater extremes still exist, and that we will be able to observe them as lightning detection technology improves," he said.

The previous records were assessed using data collected by ground-based so-called lightning mapping array networks, which many lightning scientists acknowledge face upper limits in the scale of lightning that can be observed, WMO said.

It hailed recent advances in space-based lightning mapping that allow for measuring "flash extent and duration continuously over broad geo-spatial domains."

This has allowed for the detection of "previously unobserved extremes in lightning occurrence, known as 'megaflashes'," Michael J. Peterson, of the Space and Remote Sensing Group of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, said in the statement.

Megaflashes, he said, "are defined as horizontal mesoscale lightning discharges that reach hundreds of kilometres in length."

The UN agency occasionally reveals quirky weather-related milestones, like in 2016 revealing a record wave measurement of a behemoth that towered 19 metres (62.3 feet) -- taller than a six-storey building -- above the North Atlantic.

All such records are stored in the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes.

The archive currently includes two other lightning-related extremes.

One is for the most people killed by a single direct strike of lightning, when 21 people died in Zimbabwe in 1975 as they huddled for safety in a hut that was hit.

The other is for an indirect strike, when 469 people died in Dronka, Egypt when lightning struck a set of oil tanks in 1994, causing burning oil to flood the town.


Related Links
Weather News at TerraDaily.com


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WEATHER REPORT
ESA's storm hunter ASIM turns two
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The Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor or ASIM, mounted outside the European laboratory of the International Space Station, enters its second year of science operations. Launched in April 2018, the payload began operating on 14 June 2018 and has been studying thunderstorms 400 km above Earth ever since. Specifically, ASIM is on the hunt for elusive electrical discharges in the upper atmosphere, or lightning that extends upwards into space. These discharges have alluring names like red spr ... read more

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