When a storm’s charging zone sits close to the earth’s surface, the resulting “superbolts” can be 1,000 times stronger than regular lightning.
From the American Geophysical Union
Superbolts are more likely to strike the closer a storm cloud’s electrical charging zone is to the land or ocean’s surface, a new study finds. These conditions are responsible for superbolt “hotspots” above some oceans and tall mountains.
Superbolts make up less than 1% of total lightning, but when they do strike, they pack a powerful punch. While the average lightning strike contains around 300 million volts, superbolts are 1,000 times stronger and can cause major damage to infrastructure and ships, the authors say.
“Superbolts, even though they’re only a very, very tiny percentage of all lightning, they’re a magnificent phenomenon,” said Avichay Efraim, a physicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lead author of this study.
A 2019 report found that superbolts tend to cluster over the Northeast Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea and the Altiplano in Peru and Bolivia, which is one of the tallest plateaus on Earth. “We wanted to know what makes these powerful superbolts more likely to form in some places as opposed to others,” Efraim said.
The new study provides the first explanation for the formation and distribution of superbolts over land and sea worldwide. The research was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, AGU’s journal dedicated to advancing the understanding of Earth’s atmosphere and its interaction with other components of the Earth system.
Storm clouds often reach 12 to 18 kilometers (7.5 to 11 miles) in height, spanning a wide range of temperatures. But for lightning to form, a cloud must straddle the line where the air temperature reaches 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Above the freezing line, in the upper reaches of the cloud, electrification takes place and generates the lightning’s “charging zone.” Efraim wondered whether changes in freezing line altitude, and subsequently charging zone height, could influence a storm’s ability to form superbolts.
Past studies have explored whether superbolt strength could be affected by sea spray, shipping lane emissions, ocean salinity or even desert dust, but those studies were limited to regional bodies of water and could explain at most only part of the regional distribution of superbolts. A global explanation of superbolt hotspots remained elusive.
Global distribution of all superbolts from 2010-2018, with red points indicating the strongest lightning strokes. The three regions in polygons have the highest concentration of super-charged lightning making them superbolt hotspots. Credits: Efraim et al (2023), adapted from Holzworth et al. (2019)
To determine what causes superbolts to cluster over certain areas, Efraim and his co-authors needed to know the time, location and energy of select lightning strikes, which they obtained from a set of radio wave detectors. They used these lightning data to extract key properties from the storms’ environments, including land and water surface height, charging zone height, cloud top and base temperatures, and aerosol concentrations. They then looked for correlations between each of these factors and superbolt strength, gleaning insights into what causes stronger lightning — and what doesn’t.
The researchers found that contrary to previous studies, aerosols did not have a significant effect on superbolt strength. Instead, a smaller distance between the charging zone and land or water surface led to significantly more energized lightning. Storms close to the surface allow higher-energy bolts to form because, generally, a shorter distance means less electrical resistance and therefore a higher current. And a higher current means stronger lightning bolts.
The three regions that experience the most superbolts — the Northeast Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea and the Altiplano — all have one thing in common: short gaps between lightning charging zones and surfaces.
“The correlation we saw was very clear and significant, and it was very thrilling to see that it occurs in the three regions,” Efraim said. “This is a major breakthrough for us.”
Knowing that a short distance between a surface and a cloud’s charging zone leads to more superbolts will help scientists determine how changes in climate could affect the occurrence of superbolt lightning in the future. Warmer temperatures could cause an increase in weaker lightning, but more moisture in the atmosphere could counteract that, Efraim said. There is no definitive answer yet.
Moving forward, the team plans on exploring other factors that could contribute to superbolt formation, such as the magnetic field or changes in the solar cycle.
“There is much more unknown, but what we’ve found out here is a big piece of the puzzle,” Efraim said. “And we’re not done yet. There’s much more to do.”
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story tip:
British regulator OKs plan to pay homes to use less power this winter
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/british-regulator-oks-plan-pay-homes-use-less-power-this-winter-2023-10-27/
Pay them to be cold, hungry, in the dark, and dirty. Seems like a plan. Of course elites are wealthy enough to skip such payments as they’d prefer to enjoy life.
Maybe shut off the heating and with what you get paid spend the winter on the Bahamas.
I like the way you think.
Thomas Hobbes said that life outside society would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ and argued that the solution was to put some powerful individual or parliament (i.e., government) in charge. Boy, was he wrong.
Would be FAR better to pay to get some coal-fired power stations up and running again.
And better for the population and the environment.
“What Causes Earth’s Strongest Lightning Known as ‘Superbolts’?”
Climate change, obviously.
And if Superbolts aren’t caused by climate change, then Superbolts must cause climate change. Very possibly, both.
And all this time I thought it was the god Jupiter shooting off those Superbolts.
And thus CO2, obviously.
“What Causes Earth’s Strongest Lightning Known as ‘Superbolts’?”
Witches?
No! Superwitches!
No, it’s either Trump or George Bush. Either George Bush.
superbitches!
Do superwitches float?
(Turned me into a (super)newt she did).
That will be the next Trump charge. “He turned me into a newt!”
🤨
” I got better.”
Video tip – Shellenberger – A Pro-Human Environmental Policy | Michael Shellenberger – YouTube
What a load of jumbled up garbage this is.. from hyperactive children who are a loonnnnggggg way behind the curve
See the attached, from here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/11/14/lightning-superbolts-study/
NB: Not where these folks claim them all to be
What a mess, multiply by a factor of 1,000 = just as bad as Climate Science
Wonderation: How many Volts does climate science have – it also struggles to tell any difference between Power and Energy
Clue about superbolts: Superbolts occur because (remember from school?), Van de Graaf Generators have a big shiny ball on top of them..
And the bigger the ball – the bigger the spark.
yeah?
“Wonderation: How many Volts does climate science have – it also struggles to tell any difference between Power and Energy”
Measured in JiggaWatts for lightning.
Climate science has super dolts.
What a load of jumbled up garbage this is..
That’s exactly what I thought…of your comment. Was there a point? Maybe try it again sober.
There’s a basic capacitor design principle. The closer the plates are to each other, the higher the charge potential.
This takes a stronger dielectric material. Thus, what is the dielectric potential of the atmosphere in these locations.
Lightning is not a plate capacitor phenomenon. It is created by a ‘Helmholtz double layer’ between the phases ice and water. Same physics principle as ‘supercapacitors’. No dielectric material needed.
The freeze line agrees with my training as a pilot. At least the top one-third of the CB must be above the freeze line before there is lightning.
RINO spotted in Wyoming, wants state to go “carbon negative”:
https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/a-leftist-governor-in-wyoming
^^ story tip
There seems to be some correlation with trade winds and roaring 40s. Maybe it’s areas of temperature gradients closer to 9.8 than 6.4 K per km?
‘A 2019 report found that superbolts tend to cluster over the Northeast Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea and the Altiplano in Peru and Bolivia, which is one of the tallest plateaus on Earth.’
I wonder if these guys have ever heard of the Catatumbo River lightning over Lake Maracaibo – ‘[t]he phenomenon sees the highest density of lightning in the world, at 250 per km2’.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning
After reading super smart analysis and the physics of lightning bolts I ran some Helium-blowing simulations on the Quantinuum machine and came up with … yep conclusively its Superwitches. 99% confidence intervals are so tight the output looks like 1 line. Superwitches. It’s settled science. Next.
This article was kind of an interesting change in pace, focusing on atmospheric science rather than policy. Did appreciate the humor in some of the posts about “connections to climate change”.
The 300MV mentioned early on reminded me of a quote from Hermann Lemp: “To hell mit der volts, it’s der amps that count”. While the high voltages present in a lightning strike is impressive, it’s the current that causes the destruction. Typical lightning strikes are a few tens of thousands of amps, but the super bolts are hundreds of thousands of amps.
I was intrigued by the >2E+6 Joules definition of a superbolt, thinking that even an average lightning strike has more energy than that. Thinking over it a bit, that sounds more like the energy radiated in VLF radio waves.
Rubbing. Its all the cat-ions in that dry air up there.
New SUPERJOLT EV battery charges in less than 1 second to 300 billion volts. Can power 1 million houses for 10 million years with optional subsidy adapter.
One of the most unexpected aspects of superbolts is that they produce gamma radiation, a fact discovered accidentally by satellites designed to detect nuclear weapons tests. Reading about that prompted me to wonder how much energy is released by lightning per unit time globally. I know that isn’t included in the “global energy balance”, but is in fact part of it. Lightning emits electromagnetic radiation, and does so across the EM spectrum from RF through gamma. About half of it is radiated into space, with very little atmospheric absorption.
An old reference I have puts the total constant power dissipation by lightning at about 650 MW, making it a negligible part of the Earth’s energy balance. But I wonder if there are parts we have missed. Anyone have more information?
I might add that the 650 MW figure was for cloud-to-ground lightning. Cloud-to-cloud wasn’t included.
A) An hypothesis – frequency of superbolts is related to the proximity between the clouds freezing level and the surface.
B) Observations – radio detectors to find the superbolts and then look at the contemporaneous weather conditions.
C) Analyse – find that the hypothesis stands up.
This is proper science. The real deal.
It deserves more respect here.