Lightning strikes by country, state and county

These are detected strikes, not every strike that happened. Blitzortung locates a strike when enough volunteer receiving stations hear its radio pulse, so dense station regions such as Europe, North America and Japan catch a far larger fraction of their lightning than regions with few stations. Central Africa has the most lightning on Earth in satellite measurements, yet it ranks low in this table because few stations cover it. The numbers are honest counts of what the network saw; they are not a climatological ranking. Our guide on which countries get the most lightning covers what satellites see and why the two views differ.

Positions carry the network's mean location error of roughly 5.6 km, so a strike near a border can land in the neighbouring county or country. Place attribution uses offline boundary data (Natural Earth for states and provinces, US Census for counties) evaluated per strike. Rows named “Unassigned” are strikes inside a country's territory but outside every state polygon, mostly over coastal water and large lakes. See how lightning detection works for the physics of the network itself.

Counts update continuously; this page re-renders hourly. The archive began on July 28, 2026, so a full year of seasonal swing is not in the data yet. Expect the northern hemisphere to dominate through its summer and the balance to move south around December.