AD-catatumbo-lightningClass IIOpen
Catatumbo Lightning
WEIRD WEATHER
9.34° N · 71.71° W
Mouth of the Catatumbo River, Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela
Over the mouth of the Catatumbo River, where it spills into Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo, lightning storms flare on 140 to 160 nights a year, up to nine hours at a stretch. It is Earth's most lightning-dense spot and holds a Guinness World Record. Far from a mystery, it is a textbook case of geography: mountains, a warm lake, and converging night winds that brew storms almost daily.
STATUSContested
ATTENTIONHigh
WITNESSESCrew Or Team
SOURCES5 · incl. 1 academic / technical
EVIDENCEOfficial documents · Academic analysis · Instrument readings · Secondary reporting
Mechanism settled
Mostly supported
SettledOpen
7 supported · 1 contested · 1 open
§ 01
The basin is the whole story
Lake Maracaibo sits in a basin ringed on three sides by the Andes and the Perijá mountain range. It's large, shallow, and warm — the kind of lake that generates moist, rising air all day. At night, cooler air drains off the surrounding mountains and funnels into the basin, colliding with that warm, humid column. The result is almost mechanical: a nocturnal low-level jet that NASA's Earthdata team identified as the key driver of convective storms that fire on roughly 140 to 160 nights a year, lasting up to nine hours at a stretch.
This is not a mystery that resists explanation. The geography does the work. The mountains channel the wind, the warm lake provides the moisture, and the collision happens so reliably that sailors historically used the storm as a navigational beacon. The locals have a name for it: the Lighthouse of Maracaibo.
Fig. 1
140–160
nights a year
▸ NASA · Guinness World Records
How we know this
Built from 5 sources — 3 first-hand · 2 background & context, incl. 1 academic / technical. 0 of the 3 figures here are drawn directly from those sources.
Sources
- Earth's New Lightning Capital Revealed — NASA (May 2, 2016)Public record — free to reuseaccessed 2026-05-21
- The Maracaibo Beacon — NASA Earthdata (April 19, 2021)Public record — free to reuseaccessed 2026-05-21
- Albrecht et al. — Where Are the Lightning Hotspots on Earth? (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2016)Quoted or summarized under fair use — follow the link for the originalaccessed 2026-05-21
- Highest concentration of lightning — Guinness World Records
The Case File
CONTESTEDWhat's still open
The mechanism is solved — basin topography, warm lake, nocturnal mountain winds, a low-level jet. What remains open is interannual variability: what drove the ~6-week silence in early 2010, and how climate shifts will affect storm frequency over the coming decades.
What would change our mind
A first-principles atmospheric model that predicts both the geographic lock-in of the storm zone and the 2010 pause from physical inputs alone — or evidence that the storm zone has migrated or attenuated in ways the current topographic account can't explain.
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