Distribution of lightning

The distribution of lightning, or the incidence of individual strikes, in any particular place is highly dependent on its location, climate, and time of year.

This gives Lake Maracaibo the highest number of lightning strikes per square kilometer in the world, at 250.

[6] The region with the second-most is the village Kifuka, in the mountains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,[7] where the elevation is around 1,700 metres (5,600 ft), receives 232 lightning strikes per square kilometer (600 per sq mi) a year.

[9] The city of Teresina in northern Brazil has the third-highest rate of occurrences of lightning strikes in the world.

The keraunic (or ceraunic) level was the average number of days per year when thunder was heard in a given area.

[15] Vaisala is now the operator and primary distributor of data from the NLDN, and developed the Canadian Lightning Detection Network (CLDN) as of 1998.

In 2017 NOAA started deployment of Geostationary Lightning Mappers aboard their GOES-R class satellites, offering continual coverage of much of the land within the western Hemisphere.

[19] More detailed U.S. regional lightning maps based on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) data centered on different cities are put out by the Cooperative Institute for Applied Meteorological Studies at Texas A&M University.

Lightning flash density – 12 hourly averages over the year (NASA OTD/LIS) This shows that lightning is much more frequent in summer than in winter, and from noon to midnight compared to midnight to noon.
Global map of lightning frequency--strikes/km 2 /yr. The high lightning areas are on land located in the tropics. Areas with almost no lightning are the Arctic and Antarctic , closely followed by the oceans which have only 0.1 to 1 strikes/km 2 /yr.
World map showing frequency of lightning strikes, in flashes per square kilometer (km²) per year (equal-area projection). Lightning strikes most frequently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo .
Combined 1995–2003 data from the Optical Transient Detector and 1998–2003 data from the Lightning Imaging Sensor.