Global Lightning Flash Rate

This is an animation of the global lightning flash rate as we progress through the year. Notice the lightning activity peaks during the summer for each hemisphere, and most lightning occurs over land.

There's a region in the Congo in Africa that has lightning almost year round - here, there are 150 flashes per square mile per year!

This animation is created using data from the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) and Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS), two instruments developed by researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

http://lightning.nsstc.nasa.gov