Over 800 million cloud to ground lightning flashes were observed between 1988 and 2017 across the Continental US. We've visualized these flashes per hour per week of the year for all counties, fire weather zones, and airports in the Continental US, and we're excited to share this imagery with you! Each image really tells a story of thunderstorm activity for each geographic area.

Access heatmaps centered on Southern Oregon and Northern California.

Access heatmaps for entire Continental United States.

Here's a video that describes this service: 

This service is experimental, so we encourage feedback via the survey provided at the top of the map. The primary goals for this imagery are to better enable weather-related decisions and reduce risk for interests that are impacted by thunderstorms.

Note: imagery is not standardized per unit area (except for airports layer) and the intent of this first iteration of imagery isn't to compare geographic areas but instead to visualize when lightning is least/most likely per given geographic area.