'The prevalence of superbolts ........may result partly because of warm ocean currents that circulate in the winter, “When you have cold air flow over warm water, you can get strong convection.”'
I'd like to learn more about the transduction of thermal energy in the water to electrical energy in the air. How does heat become lightning? It must have to do with the physics of convection which is beyond my ken.
You would think that transducing or concentrating the heat in water into a bolt of electrical energy would require a lot of energy in the process.
If not, there's a whole lot of heat embedded in the man-made structures in Phoenix I'd like to convert to electricity.
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My son worked at the Lightning Research Center run by U. of Florida, out at Camp Blanding NE or Gainesville. During summer, when the afternoon storms arrived, and sensors on the ground detected a negative charge with a storm overhead, they'd fire these four-foot rockets painted orange, with a 3,000 foot spool of kevlar wire attached from ground to rocket. If lightning hit the rocket, the charge traveled to the ground. There, the wire was attached to anything from refrigerators to a nuclear bomb casing. You can't have lightning detonate your nuclear missile, right? Great fun for a 12-year old, assisting graduate students who mostly stayed in the trailers with computer equipment. They're probably lucky a super bolt didn't hit the launch tower...
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The article says "Dr. Holzworth and his team tagged 8,171 superbolts above one million Joules", but the cited paper specifies that they measured the one million Joules solely within a narrow radio frequency range (7 - 18 kHz).
This means that the amount of energy they measured is only a small fraction of the total energy of a superbolt, which may range from 10 billion to one trillion Joules. Source: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/world-s-strongest-lightning-hits-not-summer-november-february
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The NYT article says that a "superbolt" is one with more than one million joules, but the original paper cited by the NYT says the one million joule figure is only the energy within the 7 to 16 kHz radio frequency band.
A separate article in Science magazine gives the upper range of the total energy of a lightning bolt at from 10 billion to 1 trillion watts (joules). That's "10 gigawatts" to "one terawatt" if you remember "Back to the Future". :)
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The guy who figures out how to harness this power source is going to be rich. Probably solve 99% of our problems too.
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QUOTE: "They may predominantly form over water because there aren’t obvious places for lightning to strike. "
Has a BOAT ever been hit by a SuperBolt???
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Growing up my siblings would hide when a storm hit, but I would go outside to get a better view of the amazing light show. "It's ok mom, I won't get wet - I'll stand under a tree!" Although the odds are slim, I hope I get to experience a superbolt, even if it IS the last thing I do.
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Huh.
'Superbolts Last All Winter Long.'
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I worked and lived in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Indonesia besides knowing for earthquakes is also a country with highest incidences of lightening - "a ring of fire".
As a matter of fact, in my oil patch industry - when we design equipment and facilities for Indonesia - engineers are required to account for lightenings.
In Jakarta (a couple of decades back) was a Mexican restaurant - a little high off the ground - surrounded by hills.
During the rainy season - it offered the best view of celestial lightening show.
You could sit there for hours - sipping marguerittas - and watch the show.
I also worked offshore there - don't know about these super bolts - but they were awesome nonetheless.
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As I looked at the photo I remember watching unbeliable lightning over the ocean from the Valetta waterfront. And, as it happens, the photo is from there! Beautiful city, but oh so dull. Except for the lightning of course.
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I've taken not only to timing how long it takes the thunder to arrive after the lightning bolt to find out how close it was but timing how long it takes the thunder to subside to estimate the size of the original bolt. A really big one will typically rumble for over a minute, subsiding with time and finishing with a deep thud I'm assuming is from the center of the originating bolt. This would be the radius between me and the bolt, twelve miles or more plus the distance from me to the nearest branch of the bolt. This would indicate a systemic discharge somewhere in the vicinity of being 25 miles across. Is this a superbolt?
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@jim johnson
I think classification of a lightning bolt as a "superbolt" is tied to the amount of energy rather than its length, so i would say that it could be a superbolt, but unless you know the amount of energy there's no real way to know.
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"... Dr. Holzworth and his team tagged 8,171 superbolts above one million Joules."
I don't know much about lightning. Just *what* is over one million joules? What exactly is being measured here?
A joule is a unit of energy. One million joules is about the energy in a standard stick of dynamite. This is not a huge amount of energy, but it’s enough to damage a tree or the roof of a house. A superbolt has to emit a much much greater amount of energy.
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@P O’Shea That's right. The 1 million joules refers only to the radio emissions from 7 to 18 kHz, which is what the authors detect, not the true total energy of the lightning.
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The article states that a superbolt is one whose energy exceeds 1 million joules.
Compared to a normal lightning bolt, that is an insignificant amount of energy (about the energy in a 3000 pound car travelling at 60 mph). A quick check shows that typical lightning bolts are in the 5 billion joule range. So how big is a superbolt?
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@J Fogarty According to the paper, about 1000x as energetic as a typical lightning flash. The one million joules refers *only* to the radio frequencies that the author's sensors detect: radio emission from 7 to 18 kHz, which is a small part of the total energy.
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"... about 0.0005 percent of the lightning ..."
Isn't it far clearer to say "about one out every 20,000 bolts"?
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1/200,000?
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That’s 1 in 200,000.
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What happens when this kind of power is unleashed. Do you have a plume of dead fish or a huge cloud of water vapor?
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Has anyone explored the (land) locations where superbolts have hit?
An uncertainty of "several miles" produces a large area to explore, but perhaps a prominent strike sight can give clues to what attracted a superbolt?
At a state park near me, there's a spot where two large eastern pine trees, separated by about 15 meters were simultaneously exploded by a lilghtning strike. Splinters over 10 meters long and 30cm thick (roughly triangular cross section) were scattered up to 30 meters away, some landing javelin-like in the ground after flying over other trees. Probably a superbolt wasn't necessary for that, but the energy release is impressive.
I'm sorry I missed the event (I came by the next day and saw the blast site). Or maybe not sorry. My ears almost certainly aren't sorry.
Did you say something?
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Winter air at least over land tends to be drier. If the same holds true over water, the driver air may assist in building more charge before breakdown (lightning).
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@MH
That makes sense. According to the article, superbolts are defined as lighting bolts with energy exceeding one-million Joules. But that probably means they have a higher voltage between top and bottom when they strike (usually measured in units of volts/meter). That suggests that they would occur in a dry atmosphere that is rather thick from top-to-bottom, which produces a better insulating effect and allows more static charge to accumulate before the discharge strike.
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A spectacular light show off the coast of Washington State, followed by two inches of rain. Keep up this fascinating research.
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Fascinating! I wonder what they would look like.
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Fascinating. Makes me think of the Greek legends of Zeus and his thunderbolts. So many myths have some seed of truth to them - it’s intriguing that the Mediterranean is one of the superbolt locations.
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My husband and I saw at least one superbolt over the Poconos (Eastern Pennsylvania) during a series of training thunderstorms in the late '90s. The storm(s) started at about 7 pm and lasted for hours. They were violent; there were numerous tornado strikes, including one about a half mile from our house.
We both saw the bolt at about 8 pm, through the living room window (it was an isolated house at the top of a high hill). It was about 20 to 30 times the thickness of a "regular" lightning bolt (fading memory and the difficulty of measuring such an ephemeral object make estimation hard).
It was amazing. We often talk about it. We also saw ball lightning on that occasion, along with regular streaks.
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@donna sugoh As a trained physicist I would have thought the Super Bolts would be in the middle of the oceans, as far from land on all sides as possible, So hearing the Mediterranean was a surprise for me. I also noticed it seems they are mostly in the northern hemisphere, is it just me or did the study only look at the northern hemisphere.
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@Donna
I’m jealous!
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