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Category: Lightning

Wild Weather Weekend

Blizzards, dust storms, fires, floods, thunderstorms and tornadoes were the result of very strong back-to-back negatively tilted shortwave troughs through the eastern half of the U.S. From Texas to Wisconsin, New York to Florida, severe wind gusts, large hail, and deadly tornadoes were recorded. The hardest hit states during the... Read More

Early morning rumblers

I awoke to thunderstorms in Madison, Wisconsin this morning. The elevated storms were riding a warm front at 850 mb, fueled by moderate-to-strong warm-air advection.This was a good opportunity to look at ProbSevere LightningCast version 2, which includes Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) Reflectivity -10C as a predictor, along with several visible, near-infrared,... Read More

South Dakota’s first February tornado on record

5-minute CONUS Sector GOES-16 (GOES-East) Visible and Infrared images (above) displayed a thunderstorm that was moving southeast from Aberdeen (KABR) to Watertown (KATY) in northeastern South Dakota on 24 February 2025. While overall GLM-detected lightning activity was relatively modest, periodic increases in Flash Extent Density (orange to red pixels) were evident.A Special... Read More

Severe thunderstorms across Hawai’i

With the increasing threat for strong to severe convection across the western portion of Hawai’i, a Severe Thunderstorm Watch was issued for an area centered on the island of Kauai at 1522 UTC on 30th January 2025 (above).5-minute CONUS Sector GOES-18 Clean Infrared Window (10.3 µm) images (above) showed elongated... Read More