← Daily DoseForty-Four a Second — Daily Dose No. 107
Daily Dose / Nov 2, 2026 / Lightning
Forty-Four a Second
Satellites that stare down at thunderstorms have counted Earth’s lightning flash by flash. It happens far more often than most people would guess, it clusters in a few strange places, and it is starting to show up where it rarely did before.
44/s
Lightning flashes somewhere on Earth about 44 times every second. That adds up to roughly 1.4 billion flashes a year, and about a third of them hit the ground.NASA LIS/OTD satellite climatology
01 · The scale
Where the sky is busiest
Sixteen years of satellite data, on a grid about 10 km wide, put the world’s most lightning-struck spot over a lake in Venezuela.
Lake Maracaibo sits in a valley walled in by the Andes. Night winds converge over the warm water and set off storms on about 297 nights a year (Albrecht et al., 2016). The global rate rises with the northern summer because most of the world’s land is in the Northern Hemisphere.
02 · The map
Three places on the map
The hotspots are tropical and inland. The longest bolt ever measured crossed the US Great Plains, and the fastest relative growth is in the far north.
Schematic map, not to survey accuracy. Dots: top three flash-density hotspots (flashes/km²/yr). Vertical line: the 2017 megaflash. Shaded band: Arctic above 65°N.
03 · The trend
Fewer Americans die from it
US lightning deaths have dropped by more than 90% since the 1940s, from 329 a year to about 20, even though the population has more than doubled.
Period averages from NOAA/NWS, plus CDC for 1968–78 (a different dataset, shown for shape). The drop tracks fewer people working open fields, better forecasts and warnings, and fast emergency care.
04 · The comparison
Records, side by side
The densest hotspots see more than 200 flashes per square kilometre each year, and the longest single flash ran 829 km.
Top hotspots · flashes / km² / yr
Longest single flash · WMO certified
Measured as the longest great-circle distance across the flash, ±8 km. The 2017 flash was found later by reanalysing GOES-16 satellite data.
05 · The shift
Lightning is moving north
In one global ground network, lightning strokes above 65°N rose about eightfold in a decade, and the Arctic’s share of the world’s lightning tripled.
Strokes above 65°N, summer · WWLLN
Arctic share of global lightning
0.2%
2010
0.6%
2020
Holzworth et al., 2021. One other detection network, whose records begin in 2012, has not seen the same increase, so treat this as a strong signal rather than a settled result.
06 · The stakes
What it costs
Lightning still kills thousands of people a year, mostly farmers and outdoor workers in poorer countries. A warmer atmosphere is expected to bring more of it.
6k–24k
estimated lightning deaths worldwide each year. Countries that keep records document about 4,000.
Holle · estimate ESTIMATE
+12%
more cloud-to-ground strikes over the US for every 1 °C of global warming (±5%).
Romps et al., 2014 MODELED
~50%
more US lightning by 2100 if warming reaches about 4 °C on a high-emissions path.
Romps et al., 2014 MODELED
What you can do · why it matters
When thunder roars, go indoors
Most lightning deaths can be prevented. The US drop shows what changes in behaviour and early warnings can achieve.
If you can hear thunder, you are close enough to be struck. Get inside a fully enclosed building or a hard-topped car.
Wait 30 minutes after the last thunder before going back outside. Many strikes happen at the edges of a storm.
No place outdoors is safe. Sheltering under a tree, a pavilion or a tent does not protect you.
Support warnings where deaths are highest. Lightning detection networks and SMS alerts for farmers can cut deaths the way US forecasting did.