How many lightning strikes hit Colorado yesterday?
11,115 lightning flashes were detected across Colorado on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 11 PM MDT with 5,502 flashes in a single hour — about a normal day for this state.
Counts come from the NOAA GOES East/West Geostationary Lightning Mappers, which detect optical flashes from orbit. They include in-cloud lightning and are not a confirmed cloud-to-ground strike tally. A day here is a local calendar day in America/Denver, and totals are aggregated over the Colorado bounding box, so cells near a border can fall either side. No detections in a period is not an all-clear.
Colorado lightning by day, last 7 days
Each row is one completed local calendar day.
| Day | Detected flashes | Peak hour | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wed, Sep 9 | 11,115 | 11 PM MDT | 11,115 flashes |
| Tue, Sep 8 | 11,893 | 9 PM MDT | 11,893 flashes |
| Mon, Sep 7 | 14,565 | 7 PM MDT | 14,565 flashes |
| Sun, Sep 6 | 3,214 | 1 AM MDT | 3,214 flashes |
| Sat, Sep 5 | 9,397 | 9 PM MDT | 9,397 flashes |
| Fri, Sep 4 | 142 | 3 PM MDT | 142 flashes |
| Thu, Sep 3 | 132 | 3 AM MDT | 132 flashes |
Across the last 30 days Colorado recorded 354,496 detected flashes. The busiest day was Sunday, August 16, 2026 with 26,621.
Questions about Colorado daily lightning counts
How many lightning strikes did Colorado have yesterday?
NOAA GOES East/West GLM detected 11,115 lightning flashes across Colorado on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, local time. Activity peaked at 11 PM MDT with 5,502 flashes in that hour. These are satellite-detected optical flashes, not a confirmed cloud-to-ground strike count.
What counts as a day on this page?
A local calendar day in Colorado (America/Denver), midnight to midnight — not a UTC day. An evening storm that runs past midnight UTC still counts toward the evening it started.
Is this the same as the number on the Colorado lightning map?
No. The map page counts a rolling 24-hour window that moves with the clock. This page counts closed calendar days, so the totals are answering different questions and will not match.
Are these cloud-to-ground strikes?
No. GLM is an optical instrument on a geostationary satellite and detects total lightning, which includes in-cloud flashes. Counts are flash detections, not confirmed ground strikes, and locations are approximate flash centroids.