We had a thunderstorm last night. The whole county is buzzing because everyone thinks that something exploded just before midnight. Several posts in a row on social media. In short, it was thunder. But a bit more rare than usual. Caused by a 401 kA lightning, dubbed the Wild House Shaker. A typical lightning strike is 30 kA. If the numbers are to be believed, 401 kA is really damn a lot. They will likely say we haven’t had such lightning here for decades.
Attaching an interesting map.
The points on the map show superbolts — lightning strikes with an energy of no less than 1M J. Red points — particularly powerful superbolts with an energy of more than 2M J. That is, superbolts mostly occur in the northeastern part of the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean Sea, and less frequently — in the Andes, off the coast of Japan, and near South Africa.
this is what the page from which I took the map says (translation):
“New work shows that superbolts most often occur over the Mediterranean Sea, the northeastern Atlantic, and over the Andes, as well as in smaller amounts to the east of Japan, in tropical oceans, and near the southern tip of Africa. Unlike regular lightning, superbolts often strike over water.
“Ninety percent of lightning occurs over land,” said Holzworth (that’s the main guy on lightning at the University of Washington).
“But superbolts mostly arise over water, right up to the coastline. For example, in the northeastern Atlantic, the distribution maps of superbolts clearly show the outlines of the coasts of Spain and England.”
“The average energy of a discharge over water is higher than over land—that we knew,” he said. “But we did not expect such a stark difference.”
The season for superbolts also does not match the usual patterns of lightning. Regular lightning most often occurs in the summer—the three main so-called “lightning chimneys” coincide with summer thunderstorms over America, Africa south of the Sahara, and Southeast Asia. However, superbolts, which are more common in the Northern Hemisphere, occur in both hemispheres from November to February.
The reason for such a distribution remains a mystery. In some years, there are significantly more superbolts than in others: the end of 2013 was record-breaking, and the end of 2014 was the second largest, while in other years such events were much less frequent.
“We speculate that this may be related to sunspots or cosmic rays, but we will leave that for future research,” said Holzworth.
“For now, we are just demonstrating that there is a previously unknown pattern.”
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 