Tucson's resident lightning expert Ron Holle of VAISALA provided me with a map that shows the location of yesterday's 1,484 cloud-to-ground lightning flashes during the early evening hours.
Holle notes this was a fairly standard monsoon day, with about a dozen days with higher totals expected during the summer. Pima County usually has between 40,000 and 80,000 cloud-to-ground flashes a year. The state averages about two-thirds of a million cloud-to-ground flashes a year.
Did you know?
VAISALA owns and operates the U.S. National Lightning Detection Network. From its Tucson offices, the company's network of sensors record in real-time every lightning stroke in the continental United States — about 25 million cloud-to-ground flashes a year. In addition to the time and location of the flash, the NLDN also measures the signal strength in kiloAmps.
Also from VAISALA
Read a meteorologist's take on just how close the lightning was during a recent game at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas. The attached video, if you haven't already seen it, is not to be missed.
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