Members of the National Lightning Safety Council and the National Weather Service initiated a Lightning Safety Awareness campaign in 2001 and have continued
to promote lightning safety since. The graphs below show how successful these efforts have been in reducing lightning deaths.
The first graph shows the actual number of lightning deaths for each year between 2001 and 2023. Subsequent graphs show the average number of lightning deaths
each year during the period based on 5-yr, 10-yr, and 30-yr moving averages. Moving averages are calculated by averaging the deaths for the previous
5, 10, or 30 years and are used to smooth out year-to-year fluctuations in the data.
