770 km ‘megaflash’ shatters record for longest lightning bolt ever recorded
Global News
According to the World Meteorological Organization, a lightning bolt during a U.S. storm was so long it stretched over three states.
A bolt of lightning that stretched more than 750 kilometres has set a record for the longest flash ever recorded.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the single flash was recorded during a U.S. storm in April 2020, and that the bolt was so long it stretched over three states – Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
The new record zaps the previous one, which was set in Brazil in 2018, by 60 kilometres.
Another record was also set in the same year – the WMO confirmed a flash of lightning over Uruguay and Argentina that lasted more than 17 seconds.
According to atmospheric scientist Michael Peterson, these long-spanning, long-lasting bolts are a relatively new discovery, thanks to satellite mapping technology that’s orbiting the Earth.
“Some lightning flashes — we call them megaflashes — actually propagate for incredibly long horizontal distances, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers,” Peterson told NASA’s Earth Observatory blog, explaining that there is often much more lighting happening overhead during a storm than we think.
Normally lightning doesn’t stretch farther than a few kilometres and lasts less than a second, said Arizona State University’s Randall Cerveny, who is the chief of records confirmation for the meteorological organization.
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