Experts confirm longest-ever lightning flash: Here's where

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Published  August 6, 2025 2:29pm CDT
FOX Local

Image from NOAA’s GOES-16 satellite of the thunderstorm complex that produced the megaflash lightning bolt on October 22, 2017. (NOAA/Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere / NOAA)

The Brief

    • A 515-mile lightning flash is the longest ever recorded.
    • The flash covered skies from Texas to Missouri in 2017.
    • In 2020, another historical lightning flash was captured over Uruguay and Argentina.

A new world record has been set for the longest-ever lightning flash recorded, which happened nearly eight years ago. 

Where was the lightning flash captured?

Dig deeper:

A 515-mile lighting streak, which was spotted from space, lit up the skies from eastern Texas through Missouri in October 2017, which the World Meteorological Organization explains is the equivalent to the distance between Paris and Venice in Europe.

RELATED: This Texas town was the lightning capital of the US in 2024, data shows

This weather event took place during a thunderstorm system called a Mesoscale Convective System, which was moving along the Gulf Coast ahead of a frontal boundary, according to FOX Weather. 

The WMO’s Committee on Weather Climate Extremes, which tracks official records of global hemispheric and regional weather events, identified the record-setting lightning flash incorporating satellite technology and their data was later published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 

Have there been other historical lightning flashes recorded?

The backstory:

In addition to records relating to the length of the lightning flash, the WMO also highlighted other historical incidents involving severe weather events. 

RELATED: North Carolina gamer shocked by lightning while livestreaming

According to the WMO, the greatest time for a single lightning flash lasted over 17 seconds during a thunderstorm over Uruguay and northern Argentina on June 18, 2020.

In 1975, 21 people were killed by a single flash of lightning as they gathered for safety in a hut in Zimbabwe.

The WMO noted that 469 people were killed in Dronka, Egypt when lightning struck a set of oil tanks, causing burning oil to flood the community in 1994.

The Source: Information for this story was provided by the World Meteorological Organization and FOX Weather.  This story was reported from Washington, D.C.


 

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