Lightning in Miami, FL
Live storm risk right now, and how often Miami actually gets thunderstorms.
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How stormy is Miami, really?
Miami sees roughly 92.2 thunderstorm days a year, concentrated in May–Oct.
Storm days by month
Average days per month, 2022-2025.
Nearby cities
| City | Storm days/yr | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Hialeah, FL | 88.0 | 13 km |
| Miramar, FL | 87.0 | 24 km |
| Pembroke Pines, FL | 87.8 | 26 km |
| Hollywood, FL | 83.8 | 27 km |
| Fort Lauderdale, FL | 85.8 | 39 km |
| Coral Springs, FL | 83.8 | 56 km |
If a storm reaches you
There is no safe place outdoors. Get inside a building with wiring and plumbing, or a hard-topped car — not a shelter, not under a tree, which is where a large share of strike casualties happen. Wait 30 minutes after the last thunder before going back out; a good share of strikes hit after the rain has stopped and people think it is over.
More: how to judge distance from the flash · the full safety rules
Common questions
- How many thunderstorm days does Miami get?
- About 92.2 a year on our measure — days when the atmosphere held at least 1000 J/kg of instability and it actually rained. The season runs May–Oct, and storms most often fire around 1 pm.
- How far away is the lightning?
- Count the seconds between the flash and the thunder and divide by 5 for miles, or by 3 for kilometres. Thunder is rarely heard beyond 10 miles, so if you can hear it at all, you are already within reach of a strike.
- When is the worst time of day for storms in Miami?
- Around 1 pm. Daytime heating builds the instability, which is why so many storms fire in the afternoon and fade after sunset.
How we count storm days. A storm day here is a day whose peak convective available potential energy (CAPE) reached 1000 J/kg and which produced at least 1.0 mm of rain, measured over 2022-2025 from archived Open-Meteo model runs at 25.7743, -80.1937. It is a measure of how often conditions supported thunderstorms — not a count of lightning strikes, which no free public dataset provides at city level.