Lightning in Pasadena, TX
Live storm risk right now, and how often Pasadena actually gets thunderstorms.
Reading the latest model run…
Peak instability in the next 12 hours: —
Get Lightning Tracker for iPhone
How stormy is Pasadena, really?
Pasadena sees roughly 55.0 thunderstorm days a year, concentrated in Mar–Nov. Miami, the stormiest city we track, gets 1.7× more.
Storm days by month
Average days per month, 2022-2025.
Nearby cities
| City | Storm days/yr | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Houston, TX | 56.5 | 17 km |
| Austin, TX | 39.0 | 252 km |
| Waco, TX | 29.5 | 278 km |
| Killeen, TX | 27.0 | 289 km |
| Corpus Christi, TX | 33.5 | 299 km |
| San Antonio, TX | 27.8 | 319 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 Pasadena get?
- About 55.0 a year on our measure — days when the atmosphere held at least 1000 J/kg of instability and it actually rained. The season runs Mar–Nov, 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 Pasadena?
- 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 29.6911, -95.2091. 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.