The Amount Of Time Lightning Stuck Montana Is Hair Raising

Okay forgive me but I might be making a quite a few puns with this article.

But it really is shocking just how many times Montana was struck by lightning in the last year.

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We know that Montana is capable of producing some pretty big thunderstorms what with all this Big Sky surrounding us.

Add into that we're the 4th biggest state by landmass in America and there is a lot of places for lightning to strike in our state.

All that said I would have never guess the grand total of lightning strikes in Montana, in-cloud and cloud-to-ground, to be as high as it is.

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Montana Ranked In The Top Half Of Lightning Strikes In America

The website Vaisala Weather has been tracking lightning strikes in America for quite some time now and now that 2023 is over, they've released their statistics for the past year.

There are two ways to count lightning strikes, count, which is just the total number of strikes.

Then there is density, the amount per square kilometer of a given area.

When it comes to count, Texas always ranks number 1 due to their size, but Montana came in a respectable #16.

In total there were 4,812,076 total lightning strikes last year in Montana.

We didn't rank as high when it came to density however, there we ranked #31 with 12.9 lightning events per square kilometer.

Vaisala Weather has a very cool interactive website if you'd like to learn more about lightning strikes from 2023 in America.

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