On 22 October 2017, a single lightning flash crossed five US states in 7.39 seconds, travelled 829 kilometres from Texas to near Kansas City, and produced more than 116 cloud-to-ground strikes along its path, an event approximately fifty times longer than a typical lightning bolt that was missed at the time and only identified through a 2024 reanalysis of archived satellite data.

On the afternoon of 22 October 2017, a large thunderstorm complex moved across the central United States, extending at its peak from Minnesota down to Texas. The system produced ordinary severe weather across multiple states. It also produced, somewhere inside its cloud structure, a single connected electrical discharge that travelled 829 kilometres horizontally, from eastern [...] The post On 22 October 2017, a single lightning flash crossed five US states in 7.39 seconds, travelled 829 kilomet