The invention relates to the field of lightning science and atmospheric probing, in particular to a lightning locating method based on a particle swarm genetic mixed algorithm. According to the method, firstly a lighting stroke point initial position is obtained by adopting an oriented time difference comprehensive locating method to determine the range of a solution space, solution particles are generated randomly in the solution space, searching is carried out through a particle swarm algorithm to obtain an initial population of a certain evolution degree, then optimization of a later stage is carried out through a genetic algorithm, optimum is avoided, and finally the optimum position where lightning occurs is obtained. The position where the lightening occurs can be worked out by the lightning locating method based on the particle swarm genetic mixed algorithm, and compared with a traditional method, optimizing precision, stability and speed are all improved remarkably.