 The paper proposes a new methodology for estimating global thunderstorm activity using the World Wide Lightning Location Network, WWLLN, in the very low frequency range, and finds that even with low lightning detection efficiency on a global scale, the spatial and temporal distribution of global thunderstorm cells is well reproduced. The paper also shows that around 50% of the thunderstorms are over oceans, and estimates that the lower bound of the mean number of global thunderstorm cells in 2012 was around 10.50 per hour. This article was offered by Karen Messerman, Colin Price, and Eli Gallanti.