Abstract
Initial global extremes in lightning duration and horizontal distance were established in 2017 (Lang et al. 2016) by an international panel of atmospheric lightning scientists and engineers assembled by the WMO. The subsequent launch of NOAA's latest GOES-16 and GOES-17 with their Geostationary Lightning Mappers (GLMs) enabled extreme lightning to be monitored continuously over the Western Hemisphere up to 55° latitude for the first time.
As a result, the former lightning extremes were more than doubled in 2019 to 709 km for distance and 16.730 s for duration (Peterson et al. 2020). Continued detection and analysis of lightning "megaflashes" (American Meteorological Society 2021) has now revealed two flashes that even exceed those 2019 records.
As part of the ongoing work of the WMO in detection and documentation of global weather extremes (e.g., El Fadli et al. 2013; Merlone et al. 2019), an international WMO evaluation committee was created to critically adjudicate these two GLM megaflash cases as new records for extreme lightning. PS: This article on lightning was definitely peer-reviewed, and therefore its designation in WoS as Editorial Material is incorrect.