The longest lightning bolt recorded was 829 kilometres long and stretched nearly from eastern Texas to Kansas City in the US, according to recent measurements by the World Meteorological Organisation.

The “megaflash” lightning bolt occurred in October 2017, in a region known for violent thunderstorms.

The WMO noted in a press release on Thursday (US time) that it would take a car eight or nine hours to cover this distance, and an aeroplane at least 90 minutes. The lightning flash lasted 7.8 seconds.

“The new record lightning flash occurred in one of the hotspots for Mesoscale Convective System thunderstorms, whose dynamics permit extraordinary megaflashes to occur,” the WMO said.

The previous record-holding blitz was 768 kilometres long and occurred in April 2020 in the southern US.

The margin of error for both measurements is plus or minus eight kilometres.

Satellite data allows measurements of lightning bolts and other weather phenomena that were not possible in the past.

The new record lightning bolt was verified during an analysis of the 2017 storm using satellite technology, the WMO said.

The same department in the WMO also examines other extreme events such as heat, hail size, wind speed, and hurricanes.

The WMO highlighted other record lightning strikes, including the longest lightning bolt that lasted 17.1 seconds over Uruguay and Argentina in June 2020; and the deadliest strike on record when 21 people sheltering in a Zimbabwean hut died at once in 1975.