Lightning flash streaks over 515 miles from Texas to Kansas City: the longest ever recorded

Researchers have revisited a massive lightning storm that struck the Southeast in 2017, confirming that one of the megaflashes during the event was the largest ever recorded. A megaflash is defined as a lightning discharge that spans an exceptionally long distance or duration.

The flash from 2017, recently reexamined by researchers at Georgia Tech with support from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was found to have stretched approximately 515 miles—give or take five miles—reaching from Texas to Missouri, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Critically, this historic flash was not previously recorded, and as the WMO explained, only “discovered through a re-examination of the thunderstorm.”

New tools make studying the “extremes” of lightning possible

The flash was captured and examined using NOAA’s latest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, which will be used to further explore and better understand lightning. One of the lead authors of the evaluation, Michael J. Peterson, told the WMO that the satellite will allow scientists to study better “the extremes of what lightning is capable.”

“We are now at a point where most of the global megaflash hotspots are covered by a geostationary satellite, and data processing techniques have improved to properly represent flashes in the vast quantity of observational data at all scales,” said Peterson, who works at the Severe Storms Research Center (SSRC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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