The Year In Lightning, 2025: Florida Unseated As Nation's Lightning Capital

A lightning bolt in Ferrisburgh, Vermont in August, 2023.
AEM, an environmental consulting company, has some
interesting lightning data from 2025. 

The lightning capital of the nation is usually Florida. All summer, thunderstorms bubble up in the humid Florida air, so it seems like lighting is always zapping across the skies in the Sunshine State. Storms during other times of the year add to Florida's total. 

But in 2025, Florida lost its status - at least temporary - as the king of lightning storms.  

According to AEM, an environmental consulting firm, Oklahoma beat out Florida as the state with the highest concentration of lightning. The Sooner State had 73 flashes per square mile in 2025. The most lightning-dense county in America was Kay County, Oklahoma, with 123.4 lighting strikes per square mile.

Kay County is on the border with Kansas, about midway between Oklahoma City and Wichita, Kansas. About 43,700 people live in the county and go to enjoy 2025's lightning displays. 

Oklahoma's next door neighbor to the south, Texas, also had quite a lightning year. The state had 1.3 million more lightning flashes than normal. 

Across the United States in 2025 there were 88.4 million lightning flashes, which is 9.8 percent more  than in 2024. 

Most of those flashes had multiple pulses, in other words, flickers of charge. You'll often see a lightning bolt dim and brighten in split second intervals. Those are pulses. If you count all the pulses of lightning in the U.S. in 2025, you end up with 429.9 million pulses. 

The day with the most lightning strikes was June 15, with 929,016 of them across the nation. 

Lightning peaked on days that featured disasters costing a billion dollars or more. 

June 15 is a good example. That date as the start of a four-day outbreak of severe weather in the north-central and Northeast part of the U.S. The storm consisting of more than 60 tornado report sand 1,400 confirmed damage reports, caused seven deaths and $28 billion in damage, according to Climate Central.

The United States has a TON of thunderstorms each year. But the nearly 430 million flashes is a small percentage of the worldwide total, which is about 1.4 billion annually, according to NASA.

The lightning information AEM released this week was a teaser. Their full report is due on January 12 The report will have state by state information, so I might do a followup on Vermont and New England when the information becomes available.

The full report will have information in which states and counties had the least amount of lightning, which counties besides Kay County had the most lightning, and how lightning affected airports and tourist attractions around the nation