How many lightning strikes hit Colorado yesterday?
23,507 lightning flashes were detected across Colorado on Saturday, August 15, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 6 PM MDT with 3,470 flashes in a single hour — roughly 5x 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/Denver, and totals are aggregated over the Colorado bounding box, so cells near a border can fall either side. No detections in a period is not an all-clear.
Colorado lightning by day, last 7 days
Each row is one completed local calendar day.
| Day | Detected flashes | Peak hour | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sat, Aug 15 | 23,507 | 6 PM MDT | 23,507 flashes |
| Fri, Aug 14 | 20,464 | 5 PM MDT | 20,464 flashes |
| Thu, Aug 13 | 23,055 | 7 PM MDT | 23,055 flashes |
| Wed, Aug 12 | 20,007 | 7 PM MDT | 20,007 flashes |
| Tue, Aug 11 | 4,334 | 2 PM MDT | 4,334 flashes |
| Mon, Aug 10 | 3,783 | 12 AM MDT | 3,783 flashes |
| Sun, Aug 9 | 7,071 | 9 PM MDT | 7,071 flashes |
Across the last 13 days Colorado recorded 115,390 detected flashes. The busiest day was Saturday, August 15, 2026 with 23,507.
Questions about Colorado daily lightning counts
How many lightning strikes did Colorado have yesterday?
NOAA GOES East/West GLM detected 23,507 lightning flashes across Colorado on Saturday, August 15, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 6 PM MDT with 3,470 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 Colorado (America/Denver), 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 Colorado 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.