How many lightning strikes hit Arizona yesterday?
34,337 lightning flashes were detected across Arizona on Tuesday, September 29, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 4 AM MST with 3,540 flashes in a single hour — roughly 9x a 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tue, Sep 29 | 34,337 | 4 AM MST | 34,337 flashes |
| Mon, Sep 28 | 8,035 | 8 PM MST | 8,035 flashes |
| Sun, Sep 27 | 13 | 11 PM MST | 13 flashes |
| Sat, Sep 26 | 0 | — | 0 flashes |
| Fri, Sep 25 | 2,280 | 3 AM MST | 2,280 flashes |
| Thu, Sep 24 | 23,021 | 4 PM MST | 23,021 flashes |
| Wed, Sep 23 | 16,904 | 4 PM MST | 16,904 flashes |
Across the last 30 days Arizona recorded 361,004 detected flashes. The busiest day was Monday, August 31, 2026 with 50,960.
Questions about Arizona daily lightning counts
How many lightning strikes did Arizona have yesterday?
NOAA GOES East/West GLM detected 34,337 lightning flashes across Arizona on Tuesday, September 29, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 4 AM MST with 3,540 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.
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