Lightning Outbreak

Yesterday was an extraordinary day for lightning in Alaska, with the highest number of lightning strikes recorded for any single day in the 2012-present history of the modern Alaska Lightning Detection Network.  The previous daily record from 2016 was broken by about 25%, based on strike counts for 24 hour periods ending at 6 am.

Note that the ALDN database includes plenty of lightning data from northwestern Canada, but I'm excluding anything east of 141°W (the north-south Alaska/Yukon border) so as to focus on Alaska.  (But yesterday also broke the record for the entire domain, and also for days defined as midnight-to-midnight.)

The annual totals and peak daily numbers for each year since 2012 are shown below.  It will be interesting to see if this year sets a record for the annual total; we are already past the climatological peak in lightning activity for Alaska, but a few more big days could push 2019 into first place.