Where YOU are most likely to be struck by lightning in the US: Map shows where 36.8 MILLION strikes hit the nation in 2023… so was your state a danger zone?

The chance of being struck by lightning is one in 15,300, but certain parts of the US are lightning hotspots.

New data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) has found that Americans experience 36.8 million ground strikes annually, with Florida hit hardest.

In the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area alone, more than 120,000 lightning strikes occurred in 2023.

The state’s location, combined with the shape of the peninsula being surrounded by water, is why thunderstorms occur almost every afternoon.

Meteorologists found that Louisiana had the highest number of deadly cloud-to-ground lightning strikes and that Tornado Alley also receives its fair share of lightning strikes.

“In the United States, an average of 28 people were killed by lightning every year between 2006 and 2023.” meteorologist Chris Vagasky shared in The conversation.

According to Vagasky, lightning strikes kill or maim about 250,000 people worldwide every year.

The new map revealed that lightning strikes are densest around the Gulf Coast and Southern Plains, while the western US has fewer lightning strikes.

The reason states like California rarely see lightning flashes is due to the Pacific Ocean’s atmosphere, which produces cloud-to-cloud lighting – rather than cloud-to-ground strikes.

And Arizona usually only sees lightning flashes during the monsoon season, which happens in the summer.

The map also showed that New England is in the safe zone, which is likely due to salt particles in the clouds causing droplets to fall as rain instead of rising and forming ice.

If fewer ice particles form, there is less chance of electrification of the clouds.

Vagasky and his colleagues spent six years examining data from the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) wide network of antennas, which records bursts of radio waves produced by lightning.

The researchers’ analysis of lightning data between 2017 and 2022, published this week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Societyfound that many bolts or ‘flashes’ hit the ground in multiple places at the same time, like the tines of a giant electric fork.

“We found that the US has an average of 23.4 million flashes,” Vagasky noted.

But each of those flashes shattered and crackled into 55.5 million lightning flashes and 36.8 million lightning “ground strikes” per year.

Prior to this study, estimates for lightning strikes in the US were rough and inconsistent, with meteorologists often repeating the conventional wisdom of approximately 25 million lightning strikes across America per year since the 1990s.

Later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claimed the number was closer to 40 million lightning strikes per year, an inconsistency that has hampered lightning safety and protection efforts.

While Vagasky and his colleagues also found that in some parts of the country lightning flashes are more likely to hit the ground at multiple points than others, in most of the US they have a ratio of between 1.4 and 1.8 lightning strikes per flash.

There were two notable exceptions.

The first was a triangle in the central states of the High Plains, where the team recorded the only average rate of less than one ground attack per flash, an oddity they linked to a 2014 study that found more “anomalously electrified storms” in showed the plains.

These storms had more lightning bolts traveling within and between clouds.

The second outlier occurred in the western US, which they said could be due to a lack of data due to a lack of lightning, or “statistical noise.”

“Both exceptions to the usual ratio,” Vagasky and his co-authors wrote in the Bulletin, “must be considered when designing for lightning protection in these areas.”

But government weather safety concerns aside, the researchers expressed hope that their research will simply lead to more fundamental science about the geological and geophysical conditions that cause lightning.

There may be “applications” or safety construction techniques that “benefit from the knowledge that a single flash can transfer charge to the ground at multiple, widely separated locations,” they wrote.

Additionally, according to the Idaho-based National Interagency Fire CenterAbout four million acres of land in the United States are destroyed each year by raging wildfires sparked by lightning.

The damage threatens not only people’s lives, homes and natural environments, but also the country’s economy, Vagasky said.

Insurance companies pay approximately $1 billion in lightning damage claims every year Institute for Insurance Information.

“Each giant spark of electricity travels through the atmosphere at a speed of 200,000 miles per hour,” the meteorologist said.

Each bolt of lightning “is hotter than the surface of the sun and produces thousands of times more electricity than the wall socket that charges your smartphone,” he said.

According to Vagasky, lightning is more common near the warm waters of the Gulf because the region is rich in the essential atmospheric ingredients for thunderstorms: warm and moist air close to the ground, combined with cooler, drier air above, ready to strike. to blend.

“Anywhere those ingredients are present,” he said, “lightning can occur.” All it takes is a weather event to lift the warmer and moister air.

Across the country, the relatively cooler waters of the Pacific Ocean tend to reduce the likelihood of thunderstorms, but those less frequent storms have still proven incredibly dangerous for sparking wildfires.