Thursday/Friday: Lightning Storms, Flash Flooding Event Thread

Imagine how many pages this thread might have gone, had the heaviest cells moved up over Dublin and or Kildare.

Thunder can do some startling things alright. I recall one very small cell that drifted past my location in Ontario back around summer of 1989 during hot weather, it was probably about 0930 local time and the thing was just a dot of purple on the radar that was on the TV "weather network" station we had pre-internet for radar viewing.

This thing unleashed one lightning bolt that hit a tree a few metres from our house, and it was like a bomb going off. The large tree ended up with one side split in half from that and future work for the arborists. And that's all the cell managed to do in its brief existence. I don't think it dropped any rain or generated any wind gusts. Some here might be thinking, message to MTC from another realm? Quite possibly.

At the other end of the spectrum, in the derecho severe storm event early July 15, 1995 we had twenty minutes of nearly continuous lightning and thunder, so I have experienced that and once was enough for me (that was accompanied by severe gusts and heavy rain eventually although the continuous lightning and thunder started a good ten minutes before the storm arrived).

Now living in the mountains and we get very interesting thunder here with long periods of reverberating echoes off various peaks that surround us on the north, west and south sides of the town (east is all downhill to the Columbia valley).

On Thursday near my location near Limerick city it was looking like a cell was developing. It was after 5pm. I was working in my garden at the time. About 15 minutes later this cloud had more or less dissipated. I thought we were in for some short period a thunderstorm. It was very warm and humid.

Meteorite58 wrote: »

Lightning flashes or sometimes called sheet lightning are the bolts in clouds or behind clouds that create the flash effect.

---

They are known as 'openings' here in Donegal. Always assumed everyone else called it that too?