Lightning
Weather phenomenon involving electrostatic discharge
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| February 15 2024 |
Upper-atmospheric lightning
Photographer JJ Rao captured a gigantic jet in high-resolution slow-motion video from Derby in the Kimberley Region of Western Australia.
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| 2022 | EUMETSAT planned to launch the Lightning Imager (MTG-I LI) on Meteosat Third Generation to complement NOAA's GLM, with coverage over Europe and Africa. |
| September 20 2021 |
Upper-atmospheric lightning
Photographer Frankie Lucena recorded a video of a gigantic jet plasma event over a thunderstorm in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico at 10:41 pm local time.
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| 2020 | End of a decade demonstrating a significant increase in the ratio of Arctic summertime lightning strikes compared to total global lightning strikes, highlighting the region's increasing susceptibility to lightning activity. |
| June 18 2020 | A single lightning flash in Uruguay and northern Argentina lasted for 17.1 seconds, setting a new world record for lightning duration. |
| April 29 2020 | World Meteorological Organization recorded a record-breaking lightning bolt 768 km (477.2 mi) long in the southern United States, surpassing the previous record length by 60 km. |
| 2019 |
Upper-atmospheric lightning
Storm chasers Hank Schyma and an unnamed colleague first exclusively noted the phenomenon of 'ghosts', which are faint, green glows appearing within the footprint of a red sprite and persisting after the red dissipates.
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| 2019 |
Upper-atmospheric lightning
The Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA) Atmospheric Electricity group conducted the first spectroscopy study analyzing the dynamics and chemistry of ghosts, identifying key contributors to the greenish hue including atomic iron, nickel, molecular nitrogen, ionic molecular oxygen, and trace amounts of atomic oxygen, sodium, and ionic silicon.
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| 2019 | During the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, intense forest fires created their own weather systems, producing pyrocumulonimbus clouds capable of generating fire lightning, demonstrating the complex interactions between extreme heat and atmospheric conditions. |
| October 16 2019 |
Upper-atmospheric lightning
Pilot Chris Holmes captured a high-resolution video of a gigantic jet from 35,000 feet above the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatán Peninsula. The video showed a blue streamer reaching to the ionosphere, turning red at the top, followed by a white lightning leader.
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| March 4 2019 | Previous lightning duration record was set in northern Argentina before the 2020 record. |
| October 31 2018 | Previous lightning distance record was held by a bolt in southern Brazil before the 2020 record. |
| July 24 2017 |
Upper-atmospheric lightning
The Gemini Cloudcam at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii captured several gigantic jets and ionosphere-height gravity waves during a single thunderstorm.
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| March 28 2017 |
Upper-atmospheric lightning
Photographer Jeff Miles captured four gigantic jets over Australia.
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| 2016 | NOAA launched the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite–R Series (GOES-R) with Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instruments, enabling real-time lightning activity mapping across the Western Hemisphere. |
| August 13 2016 |
Upper-atmospheric lightning
Photographers Phebe Pan and Li Hualong captured a clear wide-angle photo of a gigantic jet from different locations in Guangdong province and Hunan, China, while shooting Perseid meteors.
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| February 2 2014 |
Upper-atmospheric lightning
The Oro Verde Observatory of Argentina reported ten or more gigantic jet events over a thunderstorm in Entre Ríos south, with the storm center located at 33°S, 60°W, near the city of Rosario.
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| 2010 | Beginning of a period showing increased Arctic summertime lightning strikes relative to global total lightning strikes, indicating growing lightning activity in the Arctic region due to climate change. |
| August 12 2010 |
Upper-atmospheric lightning
A gigantic jet event was clearly recorded in eastern China, with the storm center located near the Huanghai Sea at 35.6°N, 119.8°E, as reported in the Chinese Science Bulletin on November 10, 2012.
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This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia articles Lightning & Upper-atmospheric lightning, which are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.