Heavy Rain brings flood risk for East, Midlands and South on Thursday

lt_cmdr_worf

http://www.galwaynews.ie/8023-lettermore-family-have-lucky-escape-after-lightning-hits-home

Nobody injured in that strike.

sirpsycho

congrats Darkman on the forecast! Another savage forecast from boards.ie :cool:

Sierra Oscar

Lots of lightning strike related power outages in Connaught at the moment.

chris2007

any1 no if dublin is going to get more thunderstorms later in the night?

hellboy99

Lights are flickering here.

Big Dee

Lights flickered all over Dundalk, but unfortunately no lightning showing up on any of the detectors over the east coast.
Slightly off point, but perhaps someone can shed some light on this. Hellboy99 mentioned earlier about the thunder at 6am Thursday morning in Dundalk. At 6.10am I was woken by the loudest 2 bangs (1 or 2 secoinds apart) I have ever heard. I have been in close proximity to lightning strikes before, but these were REALLY loud.
I initially assumed the strike was very close. However as I spoke to different people today, it appears all 30,000 or so inhabitants of Dundalk were woken by the bangs! I spoke to someone who described that they were lifted out of their bed and alarms going off etc, etc. Checking Google Earth they are 2 miles from me. Any time I have seen lightning 2 miles away, you usually hear a rumble (not a bang).
The only explanation I can think of is that a massive fork (or forks) travelled horizontally, thus causing a bang over a wide area.
Any other ideas??

darkman2

Probrably a cloud to ground strike or perhaps a double intra cloud strike. There were quite a few double intra cloud strikes inside there last night. I observed the lightning last night - the strikes were very loud at times - the lightning itself spectacular at times aswell. And not always blue - a bit of purple in there too. Lightning is always full of supprises.

hellboy99

Big Dee wrote: »

At 6.10am I was woken by the loudest 2 bangs (1 or 2 secoinds apart) I have ever heard.

To call it a bang is an understatement, I thought it was a nuke going off, it was the loudest bang of thunder I have ever heard to date (I'm out Toberona direction)

darkman2 wrote: »

And not always blue - a bit of purple in there too.

Seen the same here, there was a lot of purple in it.

rhonin

We got a nice storm at 3am which lasted for almost an hour. Some nice lightening and very heavy rain.

Big Dee

hellboy99 wrote: »

To call it a bang is an understatement, I thought it was a nuke going off, it was the loudest bang of thunder I have ever heard to date (I'm out Toberona direction)

Totally agree hellboy99. Even the great storms of 85 and 86, which I recall as a young fella, never produced anything like this. I also remember being about 200ft from a tree that was hit by a fork and the explosion the other night was louder! Toberona is 2.1 miles NW of my location but it appears everyone I speak to within a 2 mile radius in any direction was woken by it!
STRANGE!

hellboy99

Big Dee wrote: »

Even the great storms of 85 and 86, which I recall as a young fella, never produced anything like this.

Agree with you on that, I know a few people up lisdoo direction and they were woke up by it too. Would love to know if it was a ground strike and where.

M.T. Cranium

Just in case this factoid is not generally known, the time interval between when you see lightning and hear thunder can tell you how far away the bolt was (whether it is vertical or above your head, you have to figure out from the visuals). The rule is, for every three seconds, the bolt is one km away from you. (Used to be, for every five seconds, one mile away).

I know you don't get as many storms there as I used to get when I lived near Toronto (now on the west coast where storms are rare), but we would routinely use this rule in the evenings especially when you can see the lightning (daytime, sometimes you don't see the lightning unless you were set up looking for it, or you're very close). I recall that on the average we would start to hear the thunder when the separation was about 30 seconds (six miles or 10 kms), before that, it was just the odd distant flicker of lightning, no sound of thunder yet. Thunder carries quite well with the wind sometimes so if the low level winds are against the direction of the cell the thunder may not be heard so early on.

Worst storm I ever experienced came through in the early morning hours (July 15, 1995) where I was then living in a place called Lakefield in Ontario, it's about two hours drive northeast of Toronto. It was a very warm night and I was still up reading at 0230, became aware of lightning off to the west, and could then see the outline of a massive storm with the lightning which was quite continuous. However, could not hear thunder until about 0245, and realized that the storm was then about 12 kms away. When it came in, the thunder and lightning were continuous. I had heard about this in the American midwest, tornado alley, but even the worst storms I had been through in Ontario were nothing like this, you might get 10 strikes a minute, but this just kept up constantly and it was very difficult to separate the different strikes from their thunder, although like you're reporting about the Dublin storm, we had a few loud explosions with lightning simultaneous. This storm produced a tornado that was just dying out as it reached our location, so we were at that point where the tornado is lifting off the ground. Then about 0320, it all shifted off to the southeast and by 0340 it was back to distant lightning, no thunder. Quite a scary experience to watch through the windows (should have been in the basement really).

Where I live now, sometimes there is only one thunderstorm all summer (we tend to get weak ones in the other seasons) and one year I remember all it did was to produce one massive bolt and loud thunder, nothing else, just thirty seconds of heavy raindrops falling one at a time, and all the dogs in the city howling at the thing. Seems that dogs are the same the world over.

bennyob

here is a vid from the other night.....pretty cool

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAjmPlnGaAY

monster1

A lot of thunder and lightning right over me now.:)

chris2007

were r u ?

monster1

Roscommon