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Weather satellites detect 515-mile-long lightning flash

The "megaflash" occurred in 2017 and stretched from Texas to Missouri.

"​​We call it megaflash lightning and we're just now figuring out the mechanics of how and why it occurs," Randy Cerveny, an Arizona State University professor who contributed to the study, said in a statement. To determine this length of the record-holding megaflash, the team reviewed data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-16 satellite, which is equipped with a lightning mapper that observes about one million bolts per day. (Image credit: NOAA)"Adding continuous measurements from geostationary orbit was a major advance," Michael Peterson of Georgia Tech Research Institute, who served as lead author of a paper on the study, said in the statement.

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