Folk belief blames lightning for wildfires. NOAA and the USDA say roughly 85 percent are human-caused. Here is what GOES-16 satellite data from the 2024 fire season shows about where lightning struck and where the country burned.
One quick definition. Throughout this story, a "fire cell" is a piece of land roughly 50 km on a side (about the size of a U.S. county). We mark a cell as on fire that week if the GOES-16 satellite spotted active fire anywhere inside it during the week. Lightning strikes are counted inside the same cells. Source: NOAA GOES-16 ABI-L2-FDCC (fires) and GLM-L2-LCFA (lightning), 2024 fire season, public on AWS Open Data.
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Each circle is a fire cell: a county-sized patch of land (about 50 km on a side) where the GOES-16 satellite spotted active fire that week. Bigger circles mean more fire energy, measured in megawatts (MW): the same unit used to rate power plants. A backyard bonfire is fractions of a megawatt; a major wildfire can put out several thousand. Darker circles mean a hotter peak intensity. Drag the slider to walk from June through October.
Every week of detection layered onto the same map. By the end of October, three burn bands have emerged: the Western mountains, the southern Plains corridor through Texas, and the long Mississippi Valley. The Northeast and Upper Midwest sit out the season almost entirely.
The dots dissolve. Each state lights up by its total fire radiative power for the season. The geography is impossible to miss: a Western band of intense red, a Texas-to-Florida corridor of moderate orange, and the rest of the country quiet.
The map is recolored on two axes: fire vertically, lightning horizontally. Some states do appear dark in both directions. Texas, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Valley get agricultural burning and frequent Gulf thunderstorms, so they end up in the high-fire / high-lightning corner. But sharing a state isn't the same as one causing the other. Look at the loudest corners instead: Florida flashes the most lightning of any state and barely burns, while California burns hottest with little lightning to blame. The relationship is regional, not national. Click any state for the weekly breakdown.
One dot per fire cell, per week it burned. The X-axis is the number of lightning flashes in that same cell within the 24 hours before the fire was detected. If lightning caused fires, the dots would climb a diagonal. They don't. Drag any rectangle to focus a subset. The headline tells you how many had no preceding lightning. Whatever slice you take, the majority did.
Each state is now colored on two axes: fire intensity vertically, Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD) horizontally. VPD measures how aggressively the atmosphere pulls moisture out of vegetation — the higher it is, the drier and more combustible the fuel becomes. Unlike lightning, which showed almost no correlation with fire intensity at the national level, VPD correlates with fire radiative power at r = 0.43. The Western states that burned the hardest sit squarely in the high-VPD column. Drag the slider to watch fire cells pulse through the season as atmospheric dryness rises and falls. Click any state for its weekly fire and VPD timeline.
88 percent of fire cells had zero preceding lightning — no matter what subset of the data you select. Vapor Pressure Deficit correlates with fire intensity at r = 0.43, a far stronger signal. Our visualization lets you verify this yourself rather than simply asserting it — proving that lightning doesn't drive most U.S. wildfires. Atmospheric dryness does.