A lightning flash that extended 515 miles from eastern Texas to near Kansas City, Missouri, in 2017 was recognized Thursday as a new world record.
The flash — dubbed a “megaflash,” or a single continuous long horizontal flash that can initiate up to hundreds of cloud-to-ground strikes — happened on Oct. 22, 2017, according to a research report published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. While the storm that day had previously been analyzed by scientists, new satellite technology recently documented the megaflash exceeding 500 miles.
The previous world record recognized by the World Meteorological Organization was a megaflash on April 29, 2020, extending 477 miles across the southern United States and the Gulf of Mexico, the researchers said.
While the 2017 megaflash may be the longest in horizontal distance, it did not have the longest duration. Researchers estimated that it lasted just over 7 seconds. The current WMO-recognized record for longest duration megaflash occurred over Argentina and Uruguay in June 2020 and was about 17 seconds.
Researchers hope the technology that identified the 2017 megaflash will continue to help them evaluate more storms.
“We’re excited to see what kinds of lightning come out of this new work, and especially as technology improves and we are able to get satellites and other parts of the world, then we’ll be able to expand towards the eventual vision of providing global coverage of lightning,” said Michael Peterson, the report’s lead author and a senior research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute.
New records are likely to continue to be recognized, said Randall Cerveny, the weather and climate extremes rapporteur for WMO.
“It is likely that even greater extremes still exist, and that we will be able to observe them as additional high-quality lightning measurements accumulate over time,” he said in a statement.