United States of America - Lightning Record 1986 to 2012 - NOAA

The number of cloud-to-ground lightning flashes is calculated for each day, month, and year as well as for the 1986-to-present period of record. Additionally, the number of flashes is calculated for each hour and summarized by month, year, and period of record. Grids are also created to show only positive polarity flashes for all time periods. The summary grids are defined as a 4 km Albers Equal Area grid, fit to the continental United States.

The THREDDS Data Server provides aggregations to efficiently organize the many data files into single virtual files representing multiple variables and times merged together. Web services are available to access the Gridded Summaries using OPeNDAP, WMS, and WCS. The NetCDF Subset Service allows the download of geographic and temporal subsets in the NetCDF format as well as single grid cell time-series extraction in CSV, XML, or NetCDF formats.