NASA map reveals the remote Kimberley locations among global lightning hotspots

A small pocket of the Kimberley has been revealed as one of the world’s most active lightning zones in a 20-year collation of satellite data compiled by NASA. The US space agency on Wednesday shared its mean lightning flash density map to Facebook, which was put together using sensors from the International Space Station, Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and the Optical Transient Detector. The map revealed Lake Maracaibo on the northern shore of South America had the highest number of lightning flashes per day, and the Congo Basin in central Africa was home to a vast distance of high lightning activity. A global hotspot was also detected in the northeast Kimberley where lightning storms are renowned during the wet season. Prince Regent National Park west of Kalumburu was Oceania’s biggest lightning magnet with an average of 120 flashes per day, the 170th most active spot in the world. Further east on the Mitchell Plateau lightning flashed an average 98 times a day. Lake Maracaibo recorded an average flash rate of 389 a day over the 1995-2020 period. Lake Kivu on the Rwanda-Congo border came in second at 368 flashes a day. Los Alamos National Laboratory atmospheric scientist Michael Peterson said new climatology methods had revealed the huge distances some lightning flashes can travel. “Some lightning flashes—we call them megaflashes—actually propagate for incredibly long horizontal distances, sometimes for hundreds of kilometres,” Peterson said. Mr Peterson, who compiled a report on lightning flash density in 2021, said the longest lightning bolt ever recorded spanned 709km over Argentina and Brazil in 2018. The Wunaamin Miliwundi Ranges, Keep River National Park and Parry Lagoons Nature Reserve each made the top 10 spots in Oceania too, each with more than 80 flashes a day on average.