• The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) established a new world record for the longest lightning flash — an incredible 829 km in a notorious storm hotspot in the United States.

• The megaflash occurred during a major storm in the Great Plains in October 2017 and was some 61 kilometres greater than the previous record, also set in the same region.

• 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. 

• Normally, lightning doesn’t stretch farther than 16 km. Megaflash lightning reaches at least 100 km in length. 

• The flash was not identified in the original 2017 analysis of the storm but was discovered through re-examination. 

• WMO’s Committee on Weather and Climate Extremes, which maintains official records of global, hemispheric and regional extremes, recognised the new record with the help of the latest satellite technologies.

Other previously accepted WMO lightning extremes are:

• The greatest duration for a single lightning flash of 17.1 seconds during a thunderstorm over Uruguay and northern Argentina on June 18, 2020.

• Direct strike: 21 people killed by a single flash of lightning as they huddled for safety in a hut in Zimbabwe in 1975.

• Indirect strike: 469 people killed in Dronka Egypt when lightning struck a set of oil tanks, causing burning oil to flood the town in 1994.

What is lightning?

• Lightning is the electrical discharge in the atmosphere that can occur between clouds, ground, or into the air itself. 

• The atmosphere is an insulator between positively and negatively charged regions within clouds or between clouds and the ground. 

• When enough charge is built up, the atmosphere’s insulating capacity is overcome and a rapid electrical discharge occurs, which results in the lightning flash.

• The bright flash of light that we observe is the return stroke and is one of the last events to occur in the lifecycle of a lightning flash. 

• This return stroke can have a temperature on the order of 30,000°C. This extreme heat rapidly expands the air around it, creating the shockwave that produces thunder.

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