Even though a sizeable portion of the area missed out on Thursday’s thunderstorms, many of you dealt with some heavy rain, a few spots of gusty wind and hail, and a LOT of lightning.
I had the pleasure (misfortune) of being directly under one of those cells at about 5:30 in the evening, and I can not remember the last time I have seen lightning that constant, that frequent within a storm. At few times I was getting strikes extremely close with less than a few seconds between strikes.
I saw Christy show our lightning strike counter on Live Vipir during the 6 PM news…this keeps a running count of lighting strikes over the last ten minutes within the area that’s zoomed into on the screen. As she was focused on the cluster of storms over the eastern Upstate/North Carolina foothills and looping the progress of the storms over the previous two hours, I saw the counter number max out at 705 during the height of the storms. That’s 705 separate cloud-to-ground lightning strikes from that one large cluster of thunderstorms over only ten minutes, averaging a little over one lighting bolt per second!
With numbers like that, it seems amazing there were only a couple of reported fires during the storms.
Such electrical storms are not terribly uncommon this time of year when we get relatively slow-moving storms fueled by very hot and humid conditions. Hopefully most of us will be a little calmer in the days ahead, but it’s the time of year for pop-up, late-day storms…remember, if you are close enough to a storm to hear thunder, you are within the storm’s “lightning strike” range. Head to enclosed shelter as soon as you can.
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