The megaflash lightning that occurred in October 2017, during a major thunderstorm complex, extended from eastern Texas to near Kansas City, equivalent to the distance between Paris and Venice in Europe, the WMO report (postmarked 31 July, 2025) said.
By Salam Rajesh
The dialogues on climate change implication had since focused more on the recurring phenomena of extreme weather events happening fast one after the other, causing immense danger and threat to lives and properties around the globe.
Records are being set on the extent of extreme wildfires and floods, glacial outflows and massive damages to infrastructure unimagined and un-calculated by the people who design and construct mega dams, mountain highways, and river and sea fronts.
The latest news that captures the unimagined dimension of these ‘natural’ phenomena striking awe and terror into the hearts of the people, is the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)’s establishment of a new world record for the longest lightning flash covering an incredible length of 829 km (515 miles) in the ‘notorious storm hotspot of the Mesoscale Convective System (MCS)’ within the Great Plains in North America.
The megaflash lightning that occurred in October 2017, during a major thunderstorm complex, extended from eastern Texas to near Kansas City, equivalent to the distance between Paris and Venice in Europe, the WMO report (postmarked 31 July, 2025) said.
Describing the tremendous dimension of the once-in-a-lifetime event, the WMO noted that it could take a car around eight to nine hours and a commercial plane at least 90 minutes to cover that incredible distance.
The findings were published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by the WMO’s Committee on Weather and Climate Extremes which maintains official records of global, hemispheric and regional extremes, and which recognized the new record with the help of latest satellite technologies.
“The extremes of what lightning is capable of is difficult to study because it pushes the boundaries of what we can practically observe. We are now at a point where most of the global megaflash hotspots are covered by a geostationary satellite”, says lead author and evaluation committee member Michael J. Peterson of the Severe Storms Research Center (SSRC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.
There is a margin of error of ± 8 km (5 miles) in the new record of 829 km (515 miles). It is 61 kilometers greater than the previous record which covered a distance of 768 ± 8 km (477.2 ± 5 miles) across parts of the southern United States on 29 April 2020, the WMO report said.
Hinting that lightning is a major hazard, and a priority for Early Warnings For All, considering the recent instances of wildfires ignited by lightning during thunderstorms, the WMO defined the event as the longest single lightning flash on record around the world.
WMO’s Secretary-General Celeste Saulo says of the event that, “Lightning is a source of wonder but also a major hazard that claims many lives around the world every year. These new findings highlight important public safety concerns about electrified clouds which can produce flashes that travel extremely large distances and have a major impact on the aviation sector and can spark wildfires”.
Citing few examples of significant lightning strikes across the globe in recent years, the WMO noted that the greatest duration for a single lightning flash of 17.102 ± 0.002 seconds during a thunderstorm was over Uruguay and northern Argentina on 18 June in 2020.
Referring to direct strike by lightning, the WMO noted that 21 people were killed by a single flash of lightning as they huddled for safety in a hut in Zimbabwe during 1975, while stating that in a case of indirect lightning strike, 469 people were killed in Dronka (Egypt) when lightning struck a set of oil tanks, causing burning oil to flood the town in a horrific incident during 1994.
Professor Randall Cerveny, Rapporteur of Weather and Climate Extremes for WMO, noted that, “This new record clearly demonstrates the incredible power of the natural environment. WMO’s assessment of environmental extremes such as this lightning distance record testifies to the significant scientific progress in observing, documenting and evaluating these extreme events. 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”.
While noting that the previous assessments that established the flash duration and extent records used data collected by ground-based Lightning Mapping Array (LMA) networks, the WMO stressed that recent advances in space-based lightning mapping offer the ability to measure flash extent and duration continuously over broad geospatial domains.
These new instruments include the Geostationary Lightning Mappers (GLMs) on the R-series Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES-16, 17, 18, and 19) that recorded the new lighting record, and their orbiting counterparts from Europe (the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) Lightning Imager) and China (FY-4 Lightning Mapping Imager), the WMO report said.
Both the previous and the new record used the same maximum great circle distance methodology to measure flash extent. The 2017 event is notable since it is one of the first storms where NOAA’s newest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-16) documented lightning megaflashes, extremely long duration lightning discharge events, according to the WMO.
Like elsewhere, Manipur is no exception to instances of lightning strikes, although on a much lower scale. There are reports of people killed by lightning strikes on rainy days, particularly during spells of thunderstorms. The danger from wildfires ignited by lightning strikes is a reality, too.
Manipur, including the other States in North East India, had since been experiencing evident pattern shift in rainfall, and in both the daytime and nighttime temperatures. Erratic rainfall punctuated by thunderstorms had since become the norm, necessitating a re-visit by the Government on climate change implications with specific reference to extreme weather events.
For the uninitiated, the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes maintains official records of the world, hemispheric and regional extreme records associated with a number of specific types of weather. Presently, the Archive lists extremes for temperature, pressure, rainfall, hail, wind and lightning, as well as two specific types of storms, tornadoes and tropical cyclones.