How many lightning strikes hit New Mexico yesterday?
18,677 lightning flashes were detected across New Mexico on Tuesday, September 29, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 6 PM MDT with 3,952 flashes in a single hour — a busier-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/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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tue, Sep 29 | 18,677 | 6 PM MDT | 18,677 flashes |
| Mon, Sep 28 | 3,298 | 3 PM MDT | 3,298 flashes |
| Sun, Sep 27 | 5 | 4 PM MDT | 5 flashes |
| Sat, Sep 26 | 2,666 | 12 AM MDT | 2,666 flashes |
| Fri, Sep 25 | 45,478 | 11 PM MDT | 45,478 flashes |
| Thu, Sep 24 | 36,400 | 4 PM MDT | 36,400 flashes |
| Wed, Sep 23 | 3,082 | 2 PM MDT | 3,082 flashes |
Across the last 30 days New Mexico recorded 469,924 detected flashes. The busiest day was Friday, September 25, 2026 with 45,478.
Questions about New Mexico daily lightning counts
How many lightning strikes did New Mexico have yesterday?
NOAA GOES East/West GLM detected 18,677 lightning flashes across New Mexico on Tuesday, September 29, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 6 PM MDT with 3,952 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.
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