Thunderstorm and Lightning Strikes Over the Raging Sea

Raging sea and Lightning Strikes in a devastating thunderstorm. The skies filled with dark clouds and high winds. The sudden flashes of lightning brighten up the skies in each strike. The huge waves crashing against the boat. The superiorly thick smoky clouds rolled in like boulders, ready to crush anything in their Way. The darkness was engulfing and seemed to fully consume any spec of light. Without warning the rain came gushing down – throwing itself heavily onto the boat. The merciless winds caused the enormous waves to crash and erupt like lava coming down From a raging volcano. The waves punch and beat the side of the boat with all of their might and the wind gusts so strong that you can hear the howling sounds moving through the boat. The immensely thick cloud and fog – like a laser. The murky water below was an opaque block, of which only faint ghost-like shadows of sea creatures could be seen. With each wave, the fragile bodies of sea creatures were thrown carelessly onto the surrounding of the boat. The storm rages on with its merciless waves. There is nothing scarier than being in the middle of a thunderstorm at night.Show more

The rainfall from thunderstorms starts and stops quite suddenly and is fairly intense while it lasts. The strong winds take the form of sudden sharp shifts in wind speed direction - squalls or gusts (possibly greater than 40% more than the 10 minute average speed) - which may not last more than a few minutes. The most severe form of these thunderstorm downdrafts are known as downbursts or microbursts, they have been observed first hand by the author at sea with speeds of around 70 to 80 knots which lasted only several minutes and DID A LOT OF DAMAGE!

If we have simultaneously, a high moisture content of the air (high relative humidity close to the earth’s surface), an unstable atmosphere and a lifting mechanism (a cold front, trough of low pressure, topographical barrier, just to name a few) to lift the moist air into the unstable environment- we should witness a thunderstorm event.

The simplest type of thunderstorm is a single 'cell'. The life cycle of a cell has three main stages:

In the 'towering cumulus' stage the thunderstorm or storm is not much more than a large cumulus cloud in which the air is all rising - called the 'updraft'. No rain or anvil cloud has yet formed. The upper edge of the cloud usually appears sharp and can often be seen growing by the second.

The 'mature stage' still has an updraft which has now reached the highest level it can (often the tropopause, the 'lid' to the lowest 10 to 20 km of the atmosphere, called the troposphere), and the cloud consequently has started to spread out at the top into the anvil shape; it usually has a soft feathery appearance since it is high enough to be composed of ice crystals rather than water droplets.

This is the fully developed cumulonimbus cloud. Although the thunderstorm proper is quite small as mentioned above, the spreading anvil cloud can cover an enormous area. It is the anvil clouds which make thunderstorms visible on satellite pictures, showing up as big blobs.

A second significant feature is that the storm has probably produced rain which falls out of the cloud base and is associated with descending air called the downdraft. It is this downdraft which when it reaches the ground and spreads out horizontally generates the sudden gusty winds nearly always associated with thunderstorms.

The downdraft is formed largely by evaporation of rain in the air below the storm, which creates a cool blob of air which sinks to the earth’s surface.

Although the downward acceleration of this cooled air is very small, the downdraft generally originates thousands of feet up in the storm, and even with only a couple of degrees of cooling, by the time the downdraft air reaches the ground it is moving fast enough to produce strong gusty winds. This also explains why the wind gusts of thunderstorms are cool and fairly moist.

The downdraft is often called the thunderstorm outflow, and the edge of it - the 'gust front' - is a favourite spot for new cells to develop, with air forced upwards as the gust front moves along. The downdraft can sometimes be clearly seen on radar or satellite imagery as a clear area of cloud-free air around a large thunderstorm cell - the sinking air dissipates any cloud in the surrounding area.

In the 'dissipating' stage of a cell, a weak updraft still exists at higher levels, but the storm consists mostly of downdraft, which has spread out sufficiently to cut off the warm moist air feeding the updraft, and since this is what sustains the storm, the cell quickly degenerates.

All three stages together take only about 30 to 50 minutes to occur. However, even non-severe thunderstorms are usually composed of more than one cell, and may last considerably longer as a result.

Thunderstorms are most common over the land in the afternoons in the late spring and summer months, but can occur in any month or at any time of day, especially over the sea.

How do thunderstorms move?

Thunderstorms usually DO NOT move with the surface wind direction and speed. Each storm cell moves with an average of the winds through the depth of the storm cloud. These average winds are known as the steering winds or more precisely, the pressure-weighted mean wind. Since the wind may, and usually does, change in both direction and speed with height, this average may be quite different from the surface wind velocity.

In the Australian East Coast for example, this steering wind on average occurs at a height of around 14000 to 16000 feet or 4 to 5 km. On most days, this wind is a westerly. This would mean that if thunderstorms formed on the Ranges to the west of Sydney or Brisbane they would move towards the coast.

Since many thunderstorms are in fact formed from a number of different cells, the formation and degeneration of cells can influence the direction in which the storm complex moves.

Thunderstorms almost never circle around and move over the same spot again.

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