Guinness World Records may be the go-to organization for measuring the extent of human achievement, but for natural phenomena, the World Meteorological Organization’s Committee on Weather and Climate Extremes sets the bar. Recently the committee certified a new record: the longest lightning strike ever measured. The bolt spanned a total of 515 miles from East Texas to an area near Kansas City in Missouri. The previous record-holder, a bolt of lightning measuring 477 miles that struck during a storm in 2020, also originated in Texas. This is no coincidence. The south-central Great Plains in the U.S. represent one of few hot spots in the world for the giant complexes of thunderstorms in which these super-long “megaflashes” are most likely to occur. These complexes arise when many smaller storms come together into one large system. Megaflashes often produce cloud-to-ground offshoots along their length, but the latest one produced more than 116 subsidiary strikes during the seven seconds it lasted, from start to finish. A typical lightning strike is visible for about half a second; the record-holder for the longest-lasting strike clocked in at more than 17 seconds. Strikes are measured using a combination of satellite technology and ground-based lightning mapping arrays — networks of sensors that record the radio signals produced by lightning. With increasingly powerful and accurate technology, meteorologists are beginning to get better data about these storms to understand exactly what makes them tick.
