Northern California was struck by a record amount of lightning last week as a persistent weather pattern brought widespread thunderstorms to the mountains.
July 25 set a single-day record with 18,833 pulse strikes across Northern California. Most of the lightning was contained to the Sierra Nevada, southern Cascade Mountains, Klamath Mountains and Trinity Alps, but a few storms moved into the northern Sacramento Valley in the evening. Pulse strike lightning records from the National Interagency Fire Center date back to 2013 in the region stretching from Santa Cruz to South Lake Tahoe up to the Oregon border.
Several more rounds of lightning in the following days brought the July 24-28 strike count to roughly 29,000…