How many lightning strikes hit Idaho yesterday?
15,899 lightning flashes were detected across Idaho on Sunday, September 6, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 5 PM MDT with 3,369 flashes in a single hour — roughly 4x a 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/Boise, and totals are aggregated over the Idaho bounding box, so cells near a border can fall either side. No detections in a period is not an all-clear.
Idaho lightning by day, last 7 days
Each row is one completed local calendar day.
| Day | Detected flashes | Peak hour | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun, Sep 6 | 15,899 | 5 PM MDT | 15,899 flashes |
| Sat, Sep 5 | 3,745 | 8 PM MDT | 3,745 flashes |
| Fri, Sep 4 | 194 | 10 PM MDT | 194 flashes |
| Thu, Sep 3 | 42 | 8 PM MDT | 42 flashes |
| Wed, Sep 2 | 10,496 | 8 AM MDT | 10,496 flashes |
| Tue, Sep 1 | 15,843 | 8 PM MDT | 15,843 flashes |
| Mon, Aug 31 | 2,895 | 8 PM MDT | 2,895 flashes |
Across the last 30 days Idaho recorded 190,690 detected flashes. The busiest day was Saturday, August 15, 2026 with 24,333.
Questions about Idaho daily lightning counts
How many lightning strikes did Idaho have yesterday?
NOAA GOES East/West GLM detected 15,899 lightning flashes across Idaho on Sunday, September 6, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 5 PM MDT with 3,369 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 Idaho (America/Boise), 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 Idaho 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.