New World Record-Longest 'Megaflash' Lightning Confirmed. It Covered A Distance From East Texas To Near Kansas City
The so-called megaflash lightning extended a distance of 515 miles from northeast Texas to near Kansas City on Oct. 22, 2017, according to the findings by Georgia Tech researchers who were supported by NASA. It lasted 7.39 seconds and struck the ground below in various spots more than 100 times.
This distance beats out the previous record megaflash of 477.2 miles set April 29, 2020, in the southern United States, according to a comprehensive database of weather records maintained by the World Meteorological Organization.
You can see the vein-like appearance of the new record megaflash shaded in green in the analysis below. The blue and red dots show where cloud-to-ground lightning strikes occurred.
Scientists found this lightning flash was not previously detected because of how data was originally processed from NOAA's GOES satellite. It was discovered when data was reanalyzed last year, so that's why the year in which this new record occurred is older (2017) than the previous one (2020).
"The 2017 event is notable in that it was one of the first storms where NOAA's newest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-16) documented lightning 'megaflashes' – extremely long duration/distance lightning discharge events," the World Meteorological Organization said in a press release.
A Georgia Tech press release said most lightning flashes stretch 10 miles or less, but longer ones covering distances of hundreds of miles happen often enough for satellites to see them.
They are typically spotted in the Great Plains, where what meteorologists call mesoscale convective systems frequently strike. These complexes of thunderstorms are notorious for producing prolific lightning as well as flash flooding, high winds, hail and sometimes tornadoes.
While this megaflash is a new record for distance, it's not in the top spot for how long it lasted. A bolt of lightning in 2020 over South America last 17 seconds, or nearly 10 seconds longer than this October 2017 event in the Great Plains, as senior meteorologist Jonathan Erdman wrote about.
Chris Dolce has been a senior digital meteorologist with weather.com for 15 years after beginning his career with The Weather Channel in the early 2000s.
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