How many lightning strikes hit the Earth each day?

How to get close to this number

Convert the rate and check it. The explanation gives roughly a hundred strikes per second; a day holds about 86,400 seconds, and multiplying gives millions. Going between a per-second rate and a daily total is the same move as several other questions here, and it makes an implausible-sounding number immediately checkable.

What makes the total large is that thunderstorms are happening somewhere at every moment. At any instant there are around two thousand storms active across the planet, mostly over tropical land, so the global rate never drops to zero. Global totals of weather events are always dominated by the fact that the planet is large and always partly in the afternoon.

The Maracaibo detail in the explanation is the geographic outlier worth knowing: a single lake that produces so much lightning that its storms were historically used as a navigation aid from hundreds of kilometres away. Lightning is not evenly distributed — it concentrates where warm moist air is forced upward — so a global average describes almost nowhere in particular.