Storm-producing fire clouds threw out hundreds of thousands of lightning strikes over wildfire-stricken British Columbia and northwestern Alberta provinces in Canada Wednesday and Thursday, bewildering meteorologists. 

Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist with the company Vaisala, which maps lightning strikes around in the world, said the North American Lightning Detection Network sensed 710,177 lightning events across British Columbia and northwestern Alberta in about 15 hours, between 3 p.m. on June 30 and 6 a.m. on July 1.

Of those, 597,314 were in-cloud pulses, meaning the strikes didn’t hit the ground. “Each in-cloud lightning ‘strike’ can be made up of multiple in-cloud pulses,” Vagasky explained.  Read more at SFGATE.