“Is it really happening more or are we observing it more?”īoth things might be true. “It seems like every two weeks in the wintertime somebody posts a video to their Instagram,” he says. Yet reports of thundersnow have increased in the decades since Market began his research. ( Here's what you need to know about lightning.) It’s also harder to distinguish a flash of lightning against the backdrop of a bright white flurry-filled sky. (And Market points out the muffled sound can also easily be mistaken for a snowplow). Although you can hear thunder rumbling well into the distance during the summer, snow is very good at absorbing sound waves-meaning you’ll only hear thunder if you’re within a few miles of it. In the decades before Market began researching thundersnow, we mostly only knew about it through occasional accounts from people who saw lightning or heard thunder during a snowstorm.īut those telltale signs tend to be masked during a snowstorm. Thundersnow has been a challenge for researchers to truly understand in part because it’s a relatively rare phenomenon. Preliminary results from Harkema’s research, which is funded by NASA’s Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space and Technology program, suggests that the supercooled liquid water and graupel aren’t as important for generating lightning in the winter as they are in the summer. “What I’m trying to understand is to what extent is important for this specific wintertime scenario,” he says. When that air rises into the even cooler atmosphere, it produces less of the supercooled liquid water that is believed to be important for producing summer thunderstorms. Learn how thunderstorms form, what causes lightning and thunder, and how these violent phenomena help balance the planet's energy and electricity.ĭuring a winter storm, the “warm” air near the ground is still very cold, or below freezing. candidate at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who studies thundersnow, says we don’t really know for sure how or why this process occurs in the wintertime.Īt any moment, about 2,000 thunderstorms are occurring worldwide. The more that mixture crashes around inside the cloud, it can create an electrical charge and result in lightning and thunder.īut Sebastian Harkema, a Ph.D. Scientists believe that thundersnow is caused by the same conditions as a summer thunderstorm: Turbulence in the atmosphere causes moist and relatively warm air near Earth’s surface to rise, where it condenses to form clouds filled with supercooled liquid water, tiny ice crystals, and a form of soft hail called graupel. This research will have real-life impacts on public safety, from creating warning systems to even changing guidance for when to fly planes and launch rockets. With new technology monitoring weather from space, we’re learning more about thundersnow than ever. Until the last 20 years, researchers couldn’t even reliably identify thundersnow, let alone study its inner workings. Though thunder and lightning in a snowstorm is a predictor of heavy snowfall, researchers have recently learned heavy snowfall is not a predictor of thunder and lightning-and are still uncovering why. In fact, his 2006 study showed that 86 percent of thundersnow events were associated with storms causing more than six inches of snowfall in a 24-hour period-more than enough to cause havoc on our roads and to our homes. If you witness those phenomena at the same time, “somebody nearby you is getting at least a half a foot of snow,” Market says. ( What are winter storm watches, advisories, and warnings?) “And then the other type was, ‘There’s no such thing as thundersnow, this never happens in wintertime storms, and you’re wasting our money.”īut as he and other scientists have shown, thundersnow-which is when thunder and lightning occur during a snowstorm-is a very real winter weather phenomenon with serious implications. “One type was, ‘Thank you for doing this, I knew that I’d seen this and nobody believed me,’” recalls Market, who is now the director of the University of Missouri’s School of Natural Resources. When Patrick Market began researching thundersnow more than two decades ago, he received two very different kinds of responses.
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