A 515-mile-long lightning flash from Texas to Missouri in 2017 has been named the world’s longest electrical bolt thanks to U.S. satellite imagery displacing a past record-holder as climate change ushers in more extreme weather.
A review of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration image from its GOES-16 satellite recently revealed that a single lightning bolt on Oct. 22, 2017 was actually some 38 miles longer than a past record-holder.
Until now, the longest lightning strike was thought to have occurred April 29, 2020 and reached from Texas to Louisiana and Mississippi—measuring 477 miles long.
However, NOAA issued a press statement Aug. 5 that the 2017 lightning bolt was actually the new record holder. The discovery was made when looking through the 2017 storm in prior satellite images.
The World Meteorological Organization established the new milestone while noting that both the 2017 and 2020 gigantic lighting flashes occurred in a known “storm hotspot” in the Great Plains region of the United States. Both lightning bursts were declared “megaflashes” because they were “extremely long duration/distance lightning discharge events.”
WMO stated that this new record bolt was produced as part of 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,” the WMO announcement stated.
Professor Randall Cerveny, in Weather and Climate Extremes for WMO, stated that advancements in science and technology make it possible to assess extreme weather such as lightning distance.
“This new record clearly demonstrates the incredible power of the natural environment,” Cerveny stated. “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.”
Part of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite program, the same NOAA GOES-16 satellite had captured images of both megaflashes in 2017 and 2020.
The GOES-16 was launched in 2016 into a geostationary orbit as the first satellite of four in the GOES-R series, which hover over fixed locations on the Earth’s surface. The final satellite in this series was launched in June 2024.
Extreme Weather
The United States sees some 25 million cloud-to-ground lightning strikes annually, according to NOAA. The U.S. government through NOAA and NASA monitor and study lightning to better understand and predict weather.
Lightning is linked to 24,000 deaths, 240,000 people injured, numerous wildfires and millions of dollars in property damage each year, NASA says.
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information tracks billions of dollars in damages from extreme weather events. In 2024, 27 of these big-ticket natural disasters including 17 severe storms (tornado outbreaks, high wind, hailstorms), 5 tropical cyclones and 2 winter storm/cold waves. “This follows 2023 in which there were a record 28 separate billion-dollar events. The total cost from these 27 events in 2024 was $182.7 billion,” NCEI’s website notes. These billion-dollar events also include wildfires, droughts and heatwaves.
More extreme weather events, higher temperatures and other changing climate conditions are expected to result in increasingly powerful storms. NCEI stated in January that costs related to natural disasters in the U.S. this year may rise by several billion dollars compared to 2024.
