![]() The result is the nearly daily development of clouds that produce thunderstorms. Much of Florida is a peninsula, bordered by the ocean on three sides with a subtropical climate. Florida has the largest number of recorded strikes during summer. In the United States, the west coast has the fewest lightning strikes, and Florida sees more lightning than any other area In 2018, 14 Florida counties ranked in the top 15 counties in the United States for having the highest lightning density. The surrounding region is referred to as the Chapada do Corisco ("Flash Lightning Flatlands"). The city of Teresina in northern Brazil has the third-highest rate of occurrences of lightning strikes in the world. Malaysia and Singapore have one of the highest rates of lightning activity in the world, after Indonesia and Colombia. The region with the second-most is the village Kifuka, in the mountains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the elevation is around 1,700 metres (5,600 ft), receives 232 lightning strikes per square kilometer (409 per sq mi) a year. This gives Lake Maracaibo the highest number of lightning strikes per square kilometer in the world, at 250. ![]() The place where lightning occurs most often is above the Catatumbo river, which feeds Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, where the so-called Catatumbo lightning flashes several times per minute, with lightning happening up to 300 nights a year. The North and South Poles and the areas over the oceans have the fewest lightning strikes. About 70% of lightning occurs on land in the Tropics, where the majority of thunderstorms occur. The map on the right shows that lightning is not distributed evenly around the planet. 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. The high lightning areas are on land located in the tropics. Distribution Global map of lightning frequency-strikes/km 2/yr. ![]() In Norway, at latitude 60° N, where the freezing elevation is lower, the (IC+CC):CG ratio is about 1:1. In the tropics, where the freeze zone is higher, the (IC+CC):CG ratio is about 9:1. The closer this region is to the ground, the more likely cloud-to-ground strikes are. The base of the negative region in a cloud is normally at roughly the elevation where freezing occurs. The lightning flash rate averaged over the Earth for intra-cloud (IC) + cloud-to-cloud (CC) to cloud-to-ground (CG) is in the ratio: (IC+CC):CG = 3:1. High quality lightning data has only recently become available, but the data indicates that lightning occurs on average 44 ±5 times every second over the entire Earth, making a total of about 1.4 billion flashes per year. Lightning does have an underlying spatial distribution. 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. 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.
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