A blinding white flash. Ears peeled to the sky.
One. Two. Three seconds waiting for the inevitable KABOOM.
And there it is — resounding thunder that shakes windows and sends Floridians dashing for cover.
During Tampa Bay summers, lightning and the ensuing thunder become the thumping heart of the region. Storms roll in as the sea breeze washes over land, and the heat of the day crescendos.
Afternoon showers and thunderstorms act like a natural air conditioner, cooling off the heat of the day, balancing the region’s weather.
During the rainy season this summer, the number of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes across Florida ranked second-highest over the last decade, up about 28% from last year.
September was especially electric around the state, including Tampa.
The city recorded more than twice the amount of lightning (a combination of in-cloud and cloud-to-ground) than typical over the month, jumping from around 21,200 strikes on average to nearly 49,000 in September.
As a historic El Niño continues to puppeteer weather, stormier days — with more lightning — are likely this fall and winter in Tampa Bay.
The increase in lightning comes as Florida leads the country in deaths caused by the violent weather this year.
Seven people have died in the state from strikes, according to the National Lightning Safety Council. Among them was a 31-year-old woman and her 2-year-old daughter as they were walking from their car in South Florida. Locally, a 41-year-old Utah man was struck in Fort De Soto Park in late August.
There’s no obvious reason for the increase, experts said. In a region known for its thunderstorms, understanding what led to more activity will take a thorough dissection of the season, said Chris Vagasky, a member of the National Lightning Safety Council.
“We have to start with what ingredients produce thunderstorms,” Vagasky said.
How does a thunderstorm form?
Florida has the highest density of lightning per square mile in the country, according to a 2025 report from Vaisala Xweather. The company measures climate data and operates the National Lightning Detection Network.
In Florida, the company said, there were around 305 lightning “events” per square mile. Oklahoma ranked second, with about 253 lightning events per square mile.
So, why so much lightning?
Florida and Tampa Bay have all the ingredients for thunderstorms. A combination of elements — moisture, lift and instability — creates the bloated thunderclouds we see in the afternoons.
Inside those clouds, high in the atmosphere where it’s below freezing, ice crystals, hail and graupel (soft, small pellets of supercooled water) bump into each other, shedding electrons and eventually generating a positive charge near the top and a negative charge near the bottom.
“What creates the lightning is, believe it or not, ice banging up against each other, and it creates this charge that works its way from the cloud down to the ground — at least in most cases,” said Matt Devitt, a Florida meteorologist.
A blast of lightning can heat the air it passes through about five times hotter than the surface of the sun. And a typical lightning flash is about 300 million volts — or about 2.5 million times the typical voltage of an outlet.
A bolt of lightning is so powerful that when it strikes a tree, it can cause it to explode by vaporizing the water inside it.
In May, USF St. Petersburg’s Marine Science Lab caught fire, and a blast of lightning is suspected to be the cause. And in August, a large apartment fire that displaced around 200 people in Wesley Chapel also started with a bolt.
Diagnosing this season
The rainy season began with a yawn this year.
In June, Tampa Bay withered under dry, relentlessly hot days. The timing and arrival of thunderstorms was finicky.
But by the end of the summer, storminess had kicked in enough to make for a typical season, said Paul Close, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Tampa Bay.
“We had some stretches where we were dry ... but we also had several days in a row when we had that easterly flow, and that would favor thunderstorms on the west coast,” Close said.
Devitt said that extra-warm temperatures this summer and the combination of favorable wind directions in the back half of the season could have led to extra lightning.
“When you have more heat, you have more power, more energy,” Devitt said.
Extra-warm temperatures can lead to more instability in the atmosphere, which is like candy for storm formation.
In Tampa, where meteorological records go back to 1890, the city had its eighth-hottest summer. In St. Petersburg, it ranked as the fifth-warmest. Lakeland recorded its hottest ever.
“The Atlantic sea breeze was winning more this summer, so that leads to more of our classic afternoon, evening storms,” Devitt said. “And those storms do historically produce more lightning.
A deeper dive into Tampa’s lightning
In the early morning hours of Aug. 20, a lightning show lit up the Tampa Bay sky.
That day alone, Florida experienced more than 90,000 instances of lightning.
The lightning storm sprang from two colliding boundaries. Extra instability in the atmosphere added an “oomph” to the storms, Christianne Pearce, a weather service meteorologist, said at the time.
“Anytime you have a collision like that, you get frequent lightning,” Pearce said.
But outside of some ups and downs, lightning was largely on par for much of Tampa’s rainy season when compared to the average of the last nine years.
But in September, lightning strikes in the city skyrocketed, according to Vaisala Xweather.
And across Florida, accounting for just lightning striking the ground, 2026 was the second-most active summer in recent years, Megan Schaefer, a spokesperson for the company, wrote in an email about the data.
“And the strongest late season by a pretty wide margin,” she wrote.
“What makes 2026 interesting is the fact that more activity happened in August and September when usually July is the peak.”
The company added that since 2020, July has been “noticeably quieter.”
Is lightning getting more common?
Lightning, despite its prevalence, is still a mystery in some ways to experts.
For example, researchers don’t know enough about the mechanisms that produce lightning to understand how much lightning may pop up in a given storm, Vagasky said.
Asked if the increase in lightning could be a symptom of human-caused climate change, Vagasky said that’s difficult to tease out because lightning and thunderstorms are small-scale phenomena.
“Even looking back at about 30 years of lightning data in the U.S., and then 30 years of satellite data, we haven’t seen a major trend one way or the other in the amount of lightning that we’ve been detecting in the U.S. or around the world,” Vagasky said.
Devitt expects this year’s strong El Niño will likely tack on even more lightning by the end of the year.
So far, El Niño has led to a mostly muted Atlantic hurricane season, outside of Hurricane Isaias, which struck northern Florida in October. But with a quieter summer could come a more aggressive winter.
“Normally, El Niño winters are not very nice to Florida,” Devitt said.
“We get a higher tornado potential. We see more severe weather, and in theory, that would bring more lightning.”
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