EP3 · Lightning
The lightning capital of Earth. The Catatumbo storms fire on roughly 300 nights a year where Andean winds meet a warm tropical lake, crowned the world's number-one lightning hotspot on NASA's finer 0.1° climatology.
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The storms are made by geography, not by any special weather system. By day the sun heats the shallow lake and the surrounding lowlands; by night a low-level jet of cooler air pours down off the three Andean ranges that wrap the basin on three sides.
Where that mountain wind slides in under the warm, humid air over the water, it forces the moist air sharply upward. The rising air builds deep thunderclouds night after night, so the lightning concentrates over the same patch of water, above the Catatumbo river mouth at the south-western shore, and fires from roughly ten in the evening until four in the morning.
Because the ingredients reset every day, the result is less a storm season than a nightly habit, which is why the satellite average over the lake is higher than anywhere else its size on the planet.