LIGHTNING STRIKES IN THE PRAIRIE SKY
Thursday morning’s thunderstorm was not the worst the city has ever seen, but it did keep more than a few people awake. The first bolt of lightning struck just before 3 a.m., and in the six hours that followed, about 5,600 lightning strikes were counted. Terri Lang, a warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment Canada, explains the situation in a question-and-answer session with The Leader-post’s Ashley Martin. Q With thunder booming all night long, was this storm unusual? A
Not every thunder shower produces this many lightning strikes, and when you see this much lightning associated with a storm it speaks to how much energy there is in the storm. Because it lasted — it made it all the way from Alberta, made it across all of Saskatchewan, strengthened overnight and kept going.
These started out as severe hail storms in Alberta ... It looked like it had snowed there, there was golf ball-sized hail, so these things developed there and then they were carried at night along this jet stream.
Q It sounds like a lot, 5,600 lightning strikes — is it? A
There was another storm, it was Aug. 8, 2014, that moved through the Regina area and it generated 40,000 lightning strikes, I think. There was a plough wind associated with that one. I was there for it. That’s why I remember it so strongly, just because I was there and there was so much lightning. It was sort of continuous lightning, and I remember the thunder sounding quite odd. I grew up in the Prairies and I grew up in Regina, so you know what thunder sounded like and that just sounded odd.
Q Storms usually pass through rather quickly. Why did Thursday’s go on for so long? A
Often we see a line of thunderstorms move through, you get blasted and then it moves on. With this one, it just kept sort of reforming and regenerating; more cells kind of kept forming over the same area, which is why there was such continuous lightning and thunder. … We do see that from time to time, it just had the right conditions that it just wanted to keep going I guess.
Q What are the right conditions? A
It has to do with the dynamics that are in the upper atmosphere. Especially these nighttime ones because often we think of thunderstorms (as) it gets hot in the afternoon, you see the thunderstorms go up, it rains, the sun goes down and everything kind of disappears.
What happens with these, we call them nocturnal thundershowers, is that they’re not based from the surface, they’re not living off the strength of the sun because obviously they’re at night. They’re carried through the atmosphere on the jet stream. It’s common in the summer, but not every thundershower is like this.
Q Why haven’t we seen a storm like this lately? A
A lot of the storms that we’ve seen this year have been carried through the cottage country, through the parklands. We’ve seen Emma Lake get hit, Candle Lake get hit, Waskesiu get hit, Jan Lake got hit. A lot of the things we don’t even hear (about) because they hit in remote areas and they’re not often on Twitter and people don’t storm-chase up there. We haven’t seen as many storms hit Regina this year for some reason. It’s just sort of the luck of the draw. That is rare, to have it develop, especially overnight, over and over and over again. You don’t see that all that often.
Q How much rain fell? A
11.7 millimetres were reported at the airport. South end of the city, 16 mm, and that’s where I’m seeing a lot of the lightning was in the south part of the city. Over the northwest, 11 mm.