Week ending Friday, November 20, 2020Superbolts
Scientists have for the first time documented how often a rare breed of extreme lightning bolts can occur in the skies above Earth and how bright they are. These “superbolts” can be 1,000 times brighter and stretch hundreds of miles farther than their more common counterparts. Writing in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, Los Alamos researchers say roughly one-third of 1%, or 1 in every 300 lightning strikes, are superbolts. Recent research finds that these extreme flashes occur in rare, positively charged cloud-to-ground events rather than the more common negatively charged...
