Vaisala has published its 2023 Annual Lightning Report. Now in its seventh year, the Vaisala Xweather annual lightning report reveals a total of 242,101,157 in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning events in the continental United States in 2023 and 2,102,170,206 lightning events worldwide.
The 2023 Annual Lightning Report highlights:
- Wind farms at great risk of lightning damage: A first-of-its-kind analysis found a total of 77,494 lightning strokes at or near 1,500 wind farms in the United States in 2023. A wind farm in Hansford County, Texas, and another straddling Blaine and Custer Counties, Oklahoma, saw more than 1,000 strokes each.
- In Oklahoma, a wind farm in Pushmataha Country saw an average of 14.4 lightning strokes per turbine in 2023, followed by a wind farm in Freeborn County, Minnesota, with 12 lightning strokes per turbine. In total, three wind farms received more than 10 cloud-to-ground lightning strokes per turbine on average. On the flipside, one-third of U.S. wind farms saw no lightning strikes at all in 2023.
- Experts estimate that lightning damage costs the industry more than $100 million annually and accounts for 60% of blade losses and almost 20% of operational losses overall.
The data comes from the Vaisala U.S. National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) and the Vaisala Global Lightning Dataset (GLD360). These two networks detect and pinpoint the location of in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning events 24 hours a day. Together, they detect 99.9% of thunderstorms worldwide, recording more than two billion lightning events every year.
