How many lightning strikes hit New Mexico yesterday?
12,242 lightning flashes were detected across New Mexico on Saturday, August 15, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 2 PM MDT with 2,065 flashes in a single hour — about 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 New Mexico bounding box, so cells near a border can fall either side. No detections in a period is not an all-clear.
New Mexico lightning by day, last 7 days
Each row is one completed local calendar day.
| Day | Detected flashes | Peak hour | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sat, Aug 15 | 12,242 | 2 PM MDT | 12,242 flashes |
| Fri, Aug 14 | 12,390 | 6 PM MDT | 12,390 flashes |
| Thu, Aug 13 | 3,766 | 4 PM MDT | 3,766 flashes |
| Wed, Aug 12 | 10,920 | 4 PM MDT | 10,920 flashes |
| Tue, Aug 11 | 21,421 | 6 PM MDT | 21,421 flashes |
| Mon, Aug 10 | 6,794 | 4 PM MDT | 6,794 flashes |
| Sun, Aug 9 | 8,916 | 5 PM MDT | 8,916 flashes |
Across the last 13 days New Mexico recorded 214,422 detected flashes. The busiest day was Friday, August 7, 2026 with 38,742.
Questions about New Mexico daily lightning counts
How many lightning strikes did New Mexico have yesterday?
NOAA GOES East/West GLM detected 12,242 lightning flashes across New Mexico on Saturday, August 15, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 2 PM MDT with 2,065 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 New Mexico (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 New Mexico 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.