Which states had the most lightning yesterday?

On Sunday, September 6, 2026, Georgia led returned state rows with 86,150 detected optical flashes.

Each row is that state’s local midnight-to-midnight calendar day. NOAA GOES East/West GLM reports optical total-lightning flash counts, not confirmed ground impacts. State bounding boxes are rectangular and can overlap, so rows cannot form a unique national total; a missing row is not proof of zero.

Returned state rows

Rank	State	Detected optical flashes
1	Georgia yesterday	86,150
2	South Carolina	66,019
3	Florida yesterday	60,076
4	Alabama	49,616
5	North Dakota	44,287
6	North Carolina	41,494
7	Mississippi	35,598
8	Iowa	34,735
9	Nebraska	31,978
10	Minnesota	31,715
11	Missouri	30,994
12	Montana yesterday	29,264
13	Tennessee	28,322
14	Texas yesterday	24,879
15	Louisiana	22,173
16	Arkansas	19,501
17	South Dakota	18,540
18	Idaho yesterday	15,899
19	Wyoming	14,104
20	Kansas	9,935
21	Virginia	7,722
22	Kentucky	5,850
23	New Mexico yesterday	4,043
24	Oklahoma	3,964
25	Colorado yesterday	3,214
26	Arizona yesterday	1,667
27	Washington yesterday	1,597
28	West Virginia	1,407
29	Oregon yesterday	417
30	Utah	335
31	Hawaii	193
32	California	162
33	Nevada	104
34	Illinois	69
35	Ohio	40
36	Michigan	13
37	New York	8
38	Pennsylvania	7
39	Indiana	7
40	Maryland	7
41	Wisconsin	7
42	Alaska	3
43	Maine	2
44	New Jersey	2
45	Delaware	1

Closed-day pages by state

These states keep their own yesterday page, whether or not they returned a row above.

What about right now?

These are closed local-day rows, not a live national tracker. Use the last-24-hour lightning map for recent activity, a state or city map for local context, and closest recent flash for distance context.

Counts are based on NOAA GOES East/West GLM observations. Read the methodology for source boundaries, cadence, and map limits.

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