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Question regarding lightning frequency and type in thunderstorms.?
A couple of days ago, there was a cluster of severe thunderstorms which produced quite a bit of hail here in the Chicago area. I even managed to recover a 1" diameter hailstone on my property. Odd thing was... there was virtually no cloud-to-ground lightning activity at all. There was quite a bit of intracloud lightning however, just no CG strikes. Other times, there are non-severe thunderstorms with CG strikes left-and-right hitting trees and blowing transformers up. And then there are times when there are storms with torrential rainfall and there is very little CG and intracloud lightning.
What determines lightning frequency in thunderstorms as well as the ratio between IC/CG lightning? Easy ten points for meteorologists (especially word-salad intolerant charlatan hunters) for this simple question!
1 Answer
- Michel VerheugheLv 76 years agoFavorite Answer
Hello, I am the world-salad charlatan your meteorologist is hunting! ;-)
From what I read, nobody really knows the mechanism of a thunderstorm. Some believe the trigger is cosmic radiations. Whenever I am to fly my little aircraft, I see sometimes in the TAF (aviation forecast) something like PROB30 CB TS, which means: 30 percent probability to see cumulonimbus developing into thunderstorm. In my experience, I have never seen the chances to be more than 40 percent. I then conclude that thunderstorms are very, very difficult to predict. Last Sunday, I was at Hamar, an airfield north of Oslo and the forecast was for thunderstorms from midday. I then got up at 6 AM to fly two and half hours home in a strong headwind but Sunday didn't see any thunderstorms at all. I could have slept much longer! ;-)
Anyway, I have no idea how we can predict the frequency of cloud-to-cloud vs. cloud-to-ground. Perhaps TQ knows but I just wanted to give you a piece of my word salad. ;-)
