I'm not sure if this information is even available, but does anyone know of a source that displays the time of lightning strikes?

I know of reports that say where lightning is most active throughout the world so I'm thinking that there is a way of tracking lightning strikes. Or is this just a generalization made using the frequency of thunderstorm activity?

It's pretty easy to get maps of cloud-to-cloud lightning.

Do you mean like this?

http://thunderstorm.vaisala.com/explorer.html

SJD wrote:Do you mean like this?

http://thunderstorm.vaisala.com/explorer.html

Kinda sorta, that's pretty cool....but I was looking more for a breakdown of lightning strike times; something that displays the percentage of lightning strikes at certain times of the day. Thanks for the link though.

How's this?

http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/papers/techmem ... l#section7

That's damage reports, not quite the same thing as strikes, and averaged across the US so things might be different in particular locations. (Edit: keep reading down from there to see it broken down by US region, season, etc.)

Another NOAA page says that there are private companies that sell archive data, but doesn't identify them.

Depending what you needed the data for, you could write a program to watch real-time lightning monitoring sites (here's one for Alaska: http://afsmaps.blm.gov/imf/imf.jsp?site=lightning ) and build your own archive.

nartreb wrote:How's this?

http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/papers/techmem ... l#section7

That's damage reports, not quite the same thing as strikes, and averaged across the US so things might be different in particular locations. (Edit: keep reading down from there to see it broken down by US region, season, etc.)

Another NOAA page says that there are private companies that sell archive data, but doesn't identify them.

Depending what you needed the data for, you could write a program to watch real-time lightning monitoring sites (here's one for Alaska: http://afsmaps.blm.gov/imf/imf.jsp?site=lightning ) and build your own archive.

This fits the bill perfectly! Thanks for the help.