WWLLN (World Wide Lightning Location Network) data on global lightning are used to investigate the increase of total lightning strokes at Arctic latitudes. We focus on the summertime data from June, July and August, which average >200,000 strokes each year above 65^o North latitude, for each of the years from 2010 – 2020. The influence of WWLLN network detection efficiency increases is minimized by normalizing to the total global strokes for each northern summer.

The ratio of strokes occurring above 65^o increases with latitude, showing that the Arctic is becoming much more influenced by lightning. We compare the increasing fraction of strokes with the global temperature anomaly for those months, and find that the fraction of strokes above 65^o to total global strokes for these months increases linearly with the temperature anomaly and grows by a factor of 3 as the anomaly increases from 0.65 to 0.95 degrees C.