The age-old maxim says lightning never strikes the same place twice. Florida would beg to disagree.
The state is the lightning capital of the United States as measured in deaths by lightning, with four fatalities in 2025; all men who died while enjoying Florida’s outdoors. Florida also leads the country in lightning density, as measured in events per square kilometer by lightning detection company Vaisala.
A WUFT analysis of Vaisala strike data found lightning strikes have generally increased in Florida since 2020. The state saw nearly 27% more strikes in the first nine months of 2025 than in all of 2024.
With some years up and some down, the data do not reveal a strong trend. But scientists analyzing decades of strike data expect lightning could become more frequent in a warming world, said Ziqin Ding, who oversees operations at the University of Florida’s International Center for Lightning Research and Testing.
“There are definitely strong correlations between lightning and climate change because lightning is an indicator of a much more unstable or unbalanced system,” Ding said. “So when we’re observing more lightning by number ... we might infer that it’s caused by climate change.”
Vaisala tracks two kinds of lightning strikes: cloud-to-cloud, which travels from one cloud to another, and cloud-to-ground, which hits the earth’s surface. Most lightning research focuses on cloud-to-ground strikes because those are the ones that directly harm people.
The five-year data covered both kinds. Annual strikes didn’t always increase. The number of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes increased by more than a third between 2021 and 2022, then decreased by nearly the same amount between 2023 and 2024 before spiking this year.
“Fuel for thunderstorms”
Florida’s distinction as the lightning capital of the U.S. is determined in part by the data Vaisala collects across the country every year. While Texas is home to the highest number of total strikes, Florida has the highest number of strikes per square kilometer, or lightning density.
Florida’s lightning-rich atmosphere comes from its unique shape and geography, said Kelsey Malloy, an assistant professor of climatology at the University of Delaware who earned her PhD from the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Sciences at the University of Miami.
Lightning comes from a convective storm, Malloy said, that is, a severe storm formed by the rapid rise of warm air in a turbulent atmosphere. Two factors in particular cause lightning to form: unstable air and wind shear – the term for sudden changes in wind speed and direction.
“It all comes down to these ingredients, especially the unstable atmosphere,” Malloy said. “That ingredient is easy to reach in Florida because it’s always so warm and moist here, so it supplies fuel for thunderstorms pretty easily.”
Florida’s jutting peninsula also plays a part in the state’s lightning activity. Winds coasting on the water on either side of the land want to move on shore, Malloy said, where they converge in the middle and lift warm air into the atmosphere.
“Increasing temperatures increase the ability of the atmosphere to hold water. More moisture increases the ability of a storm to grow more unstable,” Malloy said. “What we don’t understand is what’s going on with the other ingredient for severe convective storms, which is shear.”
It’s complicated to predict lightning trends years in advance like other climate models that help scientists forecast what changes will happen as temperatures rise, Malloy said. Lightning is affected by innumerable factors, many of which have not been researched extensively.
“In terms of the next 10 years, we unfortunately won’t know too much about lightning trends,” she said. “We’re going to need a lot more decades to really understand how lightning and severe weather events are going to change.”
“The larger the current is, the more damage it will cause you.”
Ding said lightning could also become more severe in a warmer world. Florida experiences lightning every day, he said, so the state may not feel the impact of more lightning events as much as another state with less lightning would. But more powerful lightning could prove more devastating.
A lightning bolt’s power is measured by its peak current, Ding said, which is the maximum electrical charge it carries.
“The larger the current is, the more damage it will cause you,” he said. “The most straightforward way to measure those currents is peak current, the current measured during the moment when the lightning gets connected to the ground object. If the peak current is larger, then we might be able to see severe damage.”
The average lightning strike in the U.S. measures around 30,000 amps, according to the National Weather Service. That’s about 2,000 times more than the average kitchen outlet can handle.
In Florida, where experts say the state’s unique characteristics are conducive to more extreme weather events, the most powerful strikes go far beyond the national average.
This year, Florida’s strongest strike measured just under 470,000 amps, according to the WUFT analysis of data from Vaisala, about the amount of electrical current flowing through 2,350 average-sized houses.
There is no safe place outside in a thunderstorm, according to the National Weather Service, which advises anyone outdoors to shelter in a sturdy building or hard-topped metal vehicle before lightning starts. The agency has stopped recommending people crouch in a lightning storm because it “gives people the false impression that crouching will provide safety,” according to its website.
“The rule is when thunder roars, go indoors,” said Florida State University meteorologist and lightning researcher Henry Fuelberg. Lightning paths can be so long–some six and a half miles from the edge of a cloud– people could be at risk of a lightning strike even if the sky is blue.
“What does a roar mean? It means that you can hear it. It doesn’t mean that it’s a huge boom very close to you. If you can hear it, you are close enough to be struck.”
Warming and wildfires
Lightning can cause major damage by itself. But researchers are also interested in its intersection with other impacts of climate change. Dmitri Kalashnikov, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California-Merced, predicted in an August study that parts of the United States could see more lightning and wildfires over the next 30 years.
Kalashnikov analyzed daily lightning data between June and September, the months with the greatest wildfire risk, between 1955 and 2022. If the world keeps warming at the rate it has been, he said, the northwestern United States would likely experience 4-12 more days with ground lightning strikes.
The increase in lightning, Kalashnikov said, would be driven by warmer air that holds more moisture in the atmosphere and causes more storms. A wetter climate sounds like it decreases the risk of lightning-ignited wildfires, which thrive in drought conditions, but Kalashnikov said a phenomenon common to the western U.S. called “dry lightning” gets around atmospheric moisture.
Dry lightning happens at the intersection of a storm high in the clouds and a really hot day, usually in May or June. A regular thunderstorm is happening in the upper atmosphere, Kalashnikov said, but the scorching lower atmosphere evaporates the falling rain before it hits the ground.
“Dry lightning is a clear fire risk,” he said. “You get the ignition, but there’s no downpour to extinguish it.”
The phenomenon is not common in Florida, Kalashnikov said, where the spring is wetter than western states, but the risk exists in the early summer months when the landscape is still dry. Lightning, which is responsible for hundreds of wildfires in Florida every year, could burn at least 30% more land in the southeastern United States by 2060 because of the warmer climate, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The future of lightning
For a state that leads the nation in strike density, and lightning strike deaths, a future with more potential lightning can seem scary. But scientists who study lightning say the more they can learn, the more society can work to protect people and property from lightning strikes and their consequences. The world has locked in a certain level of climate change, Kalashnikov said. But better forest management policies and increased funding for fire suppression can mitigate the threat of wildfires.
Ding, at the University of Florida, said he expects artificial intelligence will bring a lot more clarity to the mysteries of lightning in the years to come.
While researchers haven’t unraveled all the complex factors behind the frequency and strength of lightning strikes, said Malloy, there’s power in outreach to connect people to the science that begins to explain the world around them.