How many lightning strikes hit Arizona yesterday?
1,742 lightning flashes were detected across Arizona on Saturday, August 15, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 1 AM MST with 342 flashes in a single hour — a quieter-than-normal day for this state.
Counts come from the NOAA GOES East/West Geostationary Lightning Mappers, which detect optical flashes from orbit. They include in-cloud lightning and are not a confirmed cloud-to-ground strike tally. A day here is a local calendar day in America/Phoenix, and totals are aggregated over the Arizona bounding box, so cells near a border can fall either side. No detections in a period is not an all-clear.
Arizona lightning by day, last 7 days
Each row is one completed local calendar day.
| Day | Detected flashes | Peak hour | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sat, Aug 15 | 1,742 | 1 AM MST | 1,742 flashes |
| Fri, Aug 14 | 34,533 | 3 PM MST | 34,533 flashes |
| Thu, Aug 13 | 11,722 | 4 PM MST | 11,722 flashes |
| Wed, Aug 12 | 48,745 | 2 PM MST | 48,745 flashes |
| Tue, Aug 11 | 41,880 | 3 AM MST | 41,880 flashes |
| Mon, Aug 10 | 49,345 | 6 PM MST | 49,345 flashes |
| Sun, Aug 9 | 38,756 | 7 PM MST | 38,756 flashes |
Across the last 13 days Arizona recorded 382,169 detected flashes. The busiest day was Monday, August 10, 2026 with 49,345.
Questions about Arizona daily lightning counts
How many lightning strikes did Arizona have yesterday?
NOAA GOES East/West GLM detected 1,742 lightning flashes across Arizona on Saturday, August 15, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 1 AM MST with 342 flashes in that hour. These are satellite-detected optical flashes, not a confirmed cloud-to-ground strike count.
What counts as a day on this page?
A local calendar day in Arizona (America/Phoenix), midnight to midnight — not a UTC day. An evening storm that runs past midnight UTC still counts toward the evening it started.
Is this the same as the number on the Arizona lightning map?
No. The map page counts a rolling 24-hour window that moves with the clock. This page counts closed calendar days, so the totals are answering different questions and will not match.
Are these cloud-to-ground strikes?
No. GLM is an optical instrument on a geostationary satellite and detects total lightning, which includes in-cloud flashes. Counts are flash detections, not confirmed ground strikes, and locations are approximate flash centroids.