Australia has record month for lightning

November 2023 will go down in history as a month unlike any previously seen in recorded Australian meteorological history.

You can watch the lightning show in the video at the top of this story, with each tiny silver cross representing a pulse of lightning – and it begs the question: before November, what was the previous record for lightning strikes?

Unfortunately, that’s not an easy one to answer.

Right now, lightning detection is a relatively new piece of publicly available weather tech, a bit like when weather radar became available to consumers around the turn of the century.

Weatherzone meteorologist Ben Domensino told 9news.com.au that his company’s Total Lightning Network data only goes back to 2015 and that new lightning sensors are constantly being added to the network, which effectively makes comparisons between years meaningless in these early days of lightning data collection.

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But Domensino did add that November was a truly remarkable month in terms of the consistency of storm activity in all eight states and territories over virtually the entire 30-day duration of the month.

“Anecdotally, when you have one big thunderstorm outbreak, you might have more than a million lightning strikes over Australia,” he said.

“But we saw almost continuous storm activity during the day and night over every state and territory, which was very unusual.”

Domensino cited three main reasons for the abundance of electrical activity in the atmosphere in November.