700 mile wide storm produces Over One million lightning events in 18 hours

Wednesday night’s storm, which stretched more than 700 miles from eastern Iowa to northern Virginia, produced more than 1 million lightning events over 18 hours — more than 236,000 of them occurring in Illinois and over Lake Michigan, and is blamed for a house fire in Evanston.

Since 1989, every stroke and flash of lightning that happens in the continental U.S. has been recorded in real time by the Vaisala-owned National Lightning Detection Network, based in Tucson, Ariz., which monitors lightning activity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This includes the time, location and polarity of cloud-to-ground lightning and cloud pulses, which can stay in a cloud or be connected to cloud-to-ground lightning. READ MORE