“The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has established a new world record for the longest lightning flash – an incredible 829 km (515 miles) in a notorious storm hotspot in the United States of America. The megaflash occurred in October 2017, during a major thunderstorm complex.”
“It extended from eastern Texas to near Kansas City – equivalent to the distance between Paris and Venice in Europe. It would take a car about eight to nine hours and a commercial plane at least 90 minutes to cover that distance. WMO’s Committee on Weather and Climate Extremes, which maintains official records of global, hemispheric and regional extremes, recognized the new record with the help of the latest satellite technologies. The findings were published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. There is a margin of error of ± 8 km (5 mi) in the new record of 829 km (515 miles). It is 61 kilometers greater than the previous record, which covered a distance of 768 ± 8 km (477.2 ± 5 miles) across parts of the southern United States on 29 April 2020. The new record lightning flash occurred in one of the hotspots for Mesoscale Convective System (MCS) thunderstorms, whose dynamics permit extraordinary megaflashes to occur – namely, the Great Plains in North America,” says the World Meteorological Organization in a statement.