Timothy Lang, a researcher at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said the record Oklahoma lightning bolt streaked from Tulsa, near the Arkansas border, to near the Oklahoma Panhandle.
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Lang measured the flash using the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman’s lightning mapping array.
The weather publication will also record the longest-lasting lightning flash, which was 7.74 seconds on August 30, 2012, over Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, France.
The horizontal bolt travelled 200 kilometres (125 miles), the WMO’s Rapporteur of Weather & Climate Extremes, Randall Cerveny, told AFP.
The current guidelines are summed up as “when thunder roars, go indoors” – go inside when you hear thunder, and don’t resume outdoor activities until 30 minutes after the last flash of lightning.
“The lightning can start tens or hundreds of miles away and then come back to where you are”, Lang said. The Oklahoma storm was in a particularly large complex of bad weather that occurred very early on June 20, 2007. Ground lightning sensors tracked the bolt’s path. To him, the data “reinforces critical safety information regarding lightning, specifically that lightning flashes can travel huge distances from their parent thunderstorms”, he said, according to USA Today.
Recording equipment picked up the data showing the Oklahoma lightning strike, the length of which is almost the distance between New York City and Washington, D.C. It has been reported to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society for upcoming publication, USA Today reported. As part of their evaluation, the committee also unanimously agreed that the existing formal definition of “lightning discharge” should be amended to a “series of electrical processes taking place continuously” rather the previously specified time interval of one second.
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Even among lightning, these two bolts shone bright. The booming sound is a shock wave caused by the rapid expansion of air suddenly heated by the lightning bolt.
