Southwest Alaska has had an unusual increase in lighting storms this month. That lightning has ignited at least half a dozen wildfires in the Bristol Bay area.

It’s not often that Southcentral Alaska residents wake to thunder in the middle of the night. But what forecasters are calling an unusual storm moved from the Talkeetna Mountains into the Matanuska Valley and then Anchorage and south to the Kenai Peninsula from Wednesday night into Thursday morning. At least one lightning-caused structure fire was reported.

There was almost twice as much lightning north of 80 degrees in 2021 as in the previous nine years combined, a Finnish firm says.