The list of TRMM LIS top 500 lightning hotspots is based on the ranking from highest to lowest values of flash rate density climatological map in 0.10 degree resolution (LIS 0.1 Degree Very High Resolution Gridded Lightning Full Climatology (VHRFC), http://dx.doi.org/10.5067/LIS/LIS/DATA301). A criterion of a minimum distance of 100 km between maxima is applied in order to minimize an excessive number of identical place names within clusters of very high flash rate density. Each ranked grid point is then associated to a populated place location with more than 1,000 inhabitants in the geographical database GeoNames (http://www.geonames.org/). The identified lightning hotspots should be interpreted as a cluster of hotspots around a reference location. Also, it may exclude popular and well-known locations as it chooses the closest populated place and not the place with the most inhabitants.

Top 500 Lightning Hotspots in table form: 500HotspotsTable.pdf

More information on this list, citation of the hotspots and a detailed table with all the hotspots information can be found in the Albrecht et al., 2016 BAMS paper.
Investigators

Rachel I. Albrecht
Departamento de Ciências Atmosféricas (DCA)
Instituto de Astronomia, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas (IAG)
Universidade de São Paulo (USP)

Reference

Albrecht, R., S. Goodman, D. Buechler, R. Blakeslee, and H. Christian, 2016: Where are the lightning hotspots on Earth? Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00193.1