Scientists record world's longest lightning bolt that stretched over 515 miles across US
A rare 'megaflash' has just entered the record books and has claimed the honor of the world's longest lightning bolt. Stretching a whopping 515 miles, the USA bore witness to the natural phenomenon back in 2017. It's only now that it's officially been ruled as the world record.
Lightning is a sometimes terrifying occurrence, and as we've seen from it striking planes or striking cars, it's a force of nature not to be trifled with. While some claim to have captured the 'most insane' lightning strike ever, it pales in comparison to the megaflash that hit eight years ago.
According to a research paper published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, new satellite technology has confirmed that the megaflash stretched some 515 miles from eastern Texas to near Kansas City, Missouri.
Ocurring on October 22, 2017, the World Meteorological Organization has recognized that this megaflash has overtaken the previous record holder. That strike happened on April 29, 2020, and extended 477 miles from the south and the Gulf of Mexico. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-16 satellite helped certify the latest record with ever-advancing technology.
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CBS explains how a 'megaflash' is defined as a single continuous long horizontal lightning bolt that can trigger hundreds of other cloud-to-ground strikes.
Even though the 2017 strike is officially the longest in terms of horizontal distance, it only lasted a meager seven seconds. The WMO recognizes a July 2020 megaflash over Argentina and Uruguay as the duration record-holder thanks to its 17-second span.
Researchers hope that the analysis of the 2017 megaflash will help future investigations into storms like this.
Previous methods involved using data from ground-based Lightning Mapping Array (LMA) networks, but as scientists acknowledged that there are limits to what this method can monitor, there has been a move to space-based lightning mapping.
New instruments like Geostationary Lightning Mappers (GLMs) on Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites can help set new records, as well as assistance from orbiting counterparts in Europe (the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) Lightning Imager) and China (FY-4 Lightning Mapping Imager).
Cheering the new record, Michael Peterson, the report's lead author and a senior research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute said: "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."
The 2017 megaflash might not be able to hold onto its record for long, with Randall Cerveny, the weather and climate extremes rapporteur for WMO, suggesting that new records will likely start to be recognized more frequently: "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."