How many lightning strikes hit Montana yesterday?
14,630 lightning flashes were detected across Montana on Saturday, August 15, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 7 PM MDT with 2,241 flashes in a single hour — roughly 148x 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 Montana bounding box, so cells near a border can fall either side. No detections in a period is not an all-clear.
Montana lightning by day, last 7 days
Each row is one completed local calendar day.
| Day | Detected flashes | Peak hour | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sat, Aug 15 | 14,630 | 7 PM MDT | 14,630 flashes |
| Fri, Aug 14 | 8,964 | 4 PM MDT | 8,964 flashes |
| Thu, Aug 13 | 9,881 | 5 PM MDT | 9,881 flashes |
| Wed, Aug 12 | 16,218 | 9 PM MDT | 16,218 flashes |
| Tue, Aug 11 | 534 | 4 PM MDT | 534 flashes |
| Mon, Aug 10 | 31 | 3 PM MDT | 31 flashes |
| Sun, Aug 9 | 110 | 5 PM MDT | 110 flashes |
Across the last 13 days Montana recorded 50,520 detected flashes. The busiest day was Wednesday, August 12, 2026 with 16,218.
Questions about Montana daily lightning counts
How many lightning strikes did Montana have yesterday?
NOAA GOES East/West GLM detected 14,630 lightning flashes across Montana on Saturday, August 15, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 7 PM MDT with 2,241 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 Montana (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 Montana 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.