Thunder+Snow=Thundersnow

Reported November 2006

NORMAN, Okla. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Thunder, lightning and snow?!? These are three things you usually never see together! It’s called thundersnow, a combination of thunder and lightning during a snowstorm -- kind of like shaking a snow-globe and adding lightning.

"What makes thundersnow different from a regular snowstorm is really the charging of the ice particles that go on inside the cloud," David Schultz, Ph.D., a research meteorologist at the Severe Storms Lab in Norman, Oklahoma, tells Ivanhoe.

Usually, those charged ice particles would create lightning. The ice would melt and fall as rain. But in a thundersnow storm, the ice stays frozen thanks to super-cooled liquid drops inside the cloud. According to Dr. Schultz, the water drops are colder than zero-degrees Celsius or below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

Another cool thing about the thundersnow storms is they naturally muffle the sound of thunder. You can only hear them if you are less than two miles from the storm. "The lightning is a lot more muffled compared to a thunderstorm associated with rain because of the acoustic effects of the snow," Dr. Schultz says.

Thundersnow occurs mostly in the winter months. There are certain areas in the country that have more thundersnow, with a band from Oklahoma and Kansas toward The Great Lakes. Seven out of 10,000 storms reported were actual thundersnow incidents. Meteorologists are now trying to determine if thundersnow foreshadows an intense snowstorm with heavy accumulation.

So the next time you see snow, look for the storm inside the storm.

The American Meteorological Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

David Schultz, Ph.D.
Research Meteorologist
National Severe Storms Laboratory
Norman, OK
(405) 366-0453
david.schultz@noaa.gov
http://www.cimms.ou.edu

The American Meteorological Society
Boston, MA 02108-3693
(617) 227-2425
http://www.ametsoc.org

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