Thunder and lightning during a snowstorm?

is this normal? I'm in Boston.

it is kinda cool when it does happen...

I've only experienced it twice and found it unnerving and wonderful at the same time. :)

I was driving home in a blizzard once and I stopped and got out to clear off the wipers. It was daylight, but as I was standing there I just happened to see the flash in the sky and hear thunder. I figured the end of the world was upon us and jumped back in the car and headed the rest of the way home. Thank god I was in a VW Rabbit, best car ever in the snow

mighta been the rapture

I have seen it a few times here in Kansas. :toast:

are dramatically different (very warm and very cold)

but I wouldn't say it is the "norm"

but it happens

has it been warm in Boston?

This storm is very wound up and very fast, and has a lot of cold air behind it

it was warm here much later than the rest of the northeast, but has been very cold for a week or two


wonder if its HAARP :tinfoilhat: :silly:

requires a large temperature differential. Thundersnow at night is great . . . if you're inside toasting your toes in front of a crackling fire.

Was it raining and then turned to wet heavy snow?

It's the wrath of God. Clear all the gay people out of your town, or you'll be hit with a giant blizzard. :sarcasm:

It is unusual but it's very interesting when it happens. To see the lightning illuminate the falling snow is a sight to behold. I wish this could have happened at night for you, you'd have seen a rare and beautiful sight.

It's apparently pretty rare. My Son is a Meteorologist and we just talked about this while he was home for Thanksgiving. He mentioned that he saw a Master's Thesis on Thundersnow and said it was pretty interesting.

On a personal note: There was about a 12" snowstorm in the Penokee Range near Mellen, Wisconsin the night the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior (it was the same storm). I saw the thunder and lightning in the storm as I traveled to Ashland WI that night. The next day, the snow had a beautiful sky-blue hue to it when you shoveled it.

:)

Dramatic temperature swings. More violent storms. Droughts in some places, innundated in others.

Insects and wildlife you've never seen before (some not entirely welcome).

Welcome to early Global Warming effect.

Bizarre, considering that January in these parts averages about -5F.

in a snowstorm. thought I was hearing things. it was snowing so hard it whiteouted for a short space. had to stop at the next rest stop to recover my nerves.

It's not all that unusual. I've heard it many times before.

It's also blizzard conditions. I can barely see across the street.

very dramatic and you're all like WTF

thunderstorm. I am not a very good flier, and I was terrified. He has flown a lot more than I have, so I asked him if that was unusually bad. He said he'd only had one worse experience, and that was in thundersnow. I was sorry I'd asked. Now that gives me something new to worry about whenever we fly to Canada in the wintertime to see his family.

:scared:

I'm near the State House; by chance, there's a FAUX News outlet across from that...maybe a stray bolt of lightning...

started happening in the last few years in Kansas. It IS odd, isn't it?

Scientists to study flashy 'thundersnow'
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/11/12/thundersnow.study.ap/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Micro-bursts" also haven't been around here too long.

Microburst
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A photograph of the surface curl soon after an intense microburst impacted the surfaceA microburst is a very localized column of sinking air, producing damaging straight-line winds similar to, but distinguishable from tornadoes. The term was defined by severe weather expert Tetsuya Theodore Fujita as affecting an area 4 km (2.5 mi) in diameter or less, distinguishing them as a type of downbursts and apart from common wind shear which can encompass greater areas. Dr. Fujita also coined the term macroburst for downbursts larger than 4 km (2.5 mi).

They generally are formed by precipitation cooled air rushing to the surface, but they also can be powered from the high speed winds of the jet stream deflected to the surface in a thunderstorm (see downburst).

Microbursts are recognized as capable of generating wind speeds higher than 75 m/s (168 mi/h).
(snip/)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microburst



A photograph of the surface curl soon after
an intense microburst impacted the surface

We had rain, hail, sleet, snow and lightning during the snow.. It was truly amazing..

eom

Damn near went blind from backscatter from the snow.

Just not common.

Happens sort of often here in the Old Dominion. Really neat to see, actually.

I remember once when I lived in CT we had thundersnow and it was a bit frightening.

At 4:30 that morning, it was raining outside and the temp was in the mid 40s. The place where I planned to fish was a smallish lake, with some shelters with tin roofs around the lake, which were close enough to the water to fish from beneath. When I got to the lake it was still dark and it was raining even harder by that time, than it had been when I left my house. The wind was nice and warm for that time of year and blowing in gusts up to about 15 mph, as I walked down to a shelter near the lake.

By the time I drank a cup of coffee, it was getting daylight and I rigged up my fishing rod with a home made jig and a float and started fishing. The fish started biting about a half hour after daylight and I soon caught so many, that I was throwing them All back. I'd cast the floater out as far as I could and then I'd duck back under the shed and work my jig, until a fish pulled my floater under, and then I'd step out in the open, set the hook in the trout and reel him in from back under the shed.

I noticed the wind was getting colder as the morning went on and the rain kept pouring down, but the fishing was so fine, that I just kept right on fishing. The sky turned a dark greenish color about 10:00 am and about 10:30 it started to thunder and lightning, just like during a summer thunderstorm. About the time the thunder started the rain changed over to big wet snowflakes and it snowed so hard I couldn't see across the lake.

The fish just kept busting my jigs and I just kept reeling them in and releasing them. By 1:00 pm, the snow was about a foot and a half deep and it was so wet and heavy, that it was breaking the limbs in the big evergreen trees around me. The fish were still biting and I guess I'd probably caught close to 50 and I had missed about half the fish that had bitten that day. I was getting scared that if I didn't leave soon, I'd get stuck on the road home, so I started gathering up my gear and I was just about to step out from under the shelter and the damned thing caved in. I already had my gear in hand, so I jumped out from under the thing as it fell.

I made my way to my old 2x4 Dodge truck and warmed it up and swept off the snow, but when I tried to pull off the parking lot I got stuck in the snow and ice the plow had piled up. I finally got out of there after about 5 minutes of digging and the traffic was almost at a standstill all the way home. It took me 2 1/2 hours to travel the 40 miles back to my house. The snow stopped falling about 2:30 pm that day and I measured 22" in my front yard when I got home.

As bad as the weather was that day, it was one damned fine day to fish, but then every day is a fine day to fish!!!!

I've heard a few times that green skies are associated with tornadoes. I've only seen green skies two or three times in my life, and always associated with exceptional storms -- one turned out to be a tornado cloud (not the funnel itself) which I watched from a distance without knowing what it was.

it's always a bad storm following close behind. I was out in a boat once and saw it. We got caught in 80 mph straight line wind that day and I do not to this day know how we kept from sinking. The water's surface looked like a pot of water boiling, with big scary whitecaps coming from every direction and we were in a little twelve foot boat. It was a damned good thing I went fishing with the "preacher" that day I reckon!!!1!1!1!

I saw it turn green on another day when a tornado touched down across the river from my house. Tennis ball sized hail knocked about all the windows out of my house and knocked holes in my roof that day. I had big tennis ball sized dents all over my truck from the hail. The wind was above 80 mph that day too. I had a big maple tree in my yard and the wind stripped all the leaves off it and tore lots of limbs from other trees all around my place. Everybody around the area had damage their homes.

Yep, if you see a green looking sky you'd better be headed for some "series" cover.

If you live in tornado country, it would be pretty darned good to know!

On a day when the clouds were broken up so much that you could be walking in bright sunshine while seeing snowfall farther down the block -- it was like a checkerboard -- snow here, sunshine there, with low thunder in the background. Very weird.


edit to quote: ""Thundersnow oftentimes is very small-scale phenomena which can lead to wide variations in snow amounts in very small area," Koch said."

No kidding? Huh.

Boy was it beautiful~ I was lucky to see an inch or two most of my life here in TX, but that thunder, lightening and snow was a sight to behold!

Another really cool phenomenon that I have only seen once in my life was a MoonBow. Its a rainbow at night in shades of gray, and quite eerie.

Comedian Lewis Black does a hilarious bit about how when he was on LSD he thought the world was coming to an end because he looked out the window in February in Boston and saw a snowstorm with thunder and lightning. He thought what you saw was a sign of Armageddon.

On Thanksgiving morning! Our lights blinked, and my first thought was, "OMG, the turkey!". To which my husband, the grillmeister, with a gleam in his eyes, said "We'll just have to fire up the grill!"

Just usually melts before reaching the ground. ;O)

The anvil tops of thunderclouds contain water vapor (not liquid) that has frozen (skipped the liquid phase and gone straight to crystalline solid).
The process is called sublimation. Happens in clouds all the time. This is the same process that forms snowflakes. In fact, when this process occurs on the roof of your car at night, it's frost.

areas of the country (around Buffalo, NY), but the first snowstorm of my first winter here in Iowa produced all kinds of thunder and lightning...I was kind of freaked out by it at the time! :wtf:

it's like the end of the world

In Ohio. He made that comment when we saw it again at the beginning of a heavy snostorm in the mid 90's.

The farther north the thunder-snowstorm, the less the vertical development of the cell, generally speaking. I've seen lines of thunder-snowstorms going into Philly with the max tops at 15-18,000 feet. The big problem is that the higher the storms' snow content (as a percentage of other precipitation), the more the radar return is attenuated (weakened). That can make a thunder-snow cell look innocuous on an aircraft's radar screen. But fly into that little bastard at your own peril! You will get your ass kicked, and in the upper reaches of even a low-topped cell, you might pick up loads and loads of airframe and engine ice.

Scary shit. Took me an hour to knock the ice off the empennage. ;-)

I take it that was with (shudder) pneumatic boots? Sounds like a Lockheed thing to me. Kelly Johnson loved his boots. In my 1200 hours plus flying a rubber-winged Lockheed JetStar II, I never used the boots. Heat of compressibility. Newton's Law, 1st corollary. Second corollarly: Ice? Descend if you can't climb above it. QUICK FOOL! DESCEND NOW! TELL THEM WHAT YOU ARE DOING! BEG FORGIVENESS LATER! DECLARE AN EMERGENCY!

Sorry. Flash back. Stupid Baron pilot in one of those quick-ice, Jersey-Shore, equivocations. He was loaded at 7500', maybe going down. Just heard his "MAYDAY!." I am holding 20 miles away, at 12000'. Big ice build-up on the windshield wipers. Nothing on my hot wings or windshied proper. What can I say as a big, bad Boeing 737 pilot in this situation? "Glad I'm not at 7500 feet!"

Capt Mac

when I was a hotshot impervious and immortal can-do-anything 2000 hour
idiot. :D

Was in and out of the overcast at some low alt, probably...4500'? Had
at least a 100 kt headwind, could see cars on the highway passing us.
Seriously. But being in (sort of) VFR condx, I just kept on...figured
it was only 20 more minutes...well, 30...or 40...

Wouldn't wanna do it again but glad I did once. ;-)

That's when you know you are getting alot of the white stuff.

..

Happened every Spring and Fall in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

I've heard people from other parts talk about it though.

You're gonna need it.