Is there any air sweeter than the gusty blow of a lightning storm? Maybe it’s the ionized air, maybe it’s just the primal power of it, but when that wind blows, we can’t help but tumble out into it.
And wasn’t Thursday night a doozy? Around 8 pm, we pulled a rainsuit on Baby Z and wandered out into the bluster, stopped to chat with our neighbor John, ambled over to the John Stanford School and generally opened our nose to the tumult.
And then the sky lit up…green! The whole western sky, like a sharp, bright flare, two, three times.
We know we weren’t the only one to have seen it, Twitter echoed our amazement, but we couldn’t figure out what caused it. Transformer blow-out? Nuclear explosion? Alien invasion?
A clue came in via Twitter from Josh Trujillo:
Eerie lightning over N. Seattle now that seems to turn the clouds green. I think that means that there is hail in those clouds. Anyone know?
Well, the pounding hailstorm that followed certainly lent credence to the theory, and we confirmed with the Weather Network:
On rare occasions especially in strong supercells, the sky will appear to have a greenish tinge during thunderstorms. That is in most, if not all cases, an excellent sign that the storm contains hail, and probably large hail. The greenish color is caused by light (either sunlight, or in some instances the light of a lightning flash), refracting off the large ice particles suspended in the storm.
Green lightning, a rare treat.
On the plains, when the sky turns green during the day, it means “take cover!” cuz a big ol’ storm is a-brewing!
I’ve lived here since 1961 and the weather Thursday night freaked me out!
I missed the 8:00 event, and sadly didn’t even see the lightening around 11:30 or 12:00, although my dog sure did hear the thunder and told the world about it. I have never seen such a violent wind and rainstorm (completely horizontal rain), and I most definitely did see my back yard covered with hail within about 10 minutes. It was crazy!
While walking home here in Portland after the Blazers lost in the playoffs (around 10:30PM), all of the patchy clouds in the Northeast were lit up by what looked like green lightning. It flickered for about five seconds (much longer than normal lightning) and never happened again. There was no thunder or any sound. Since there was no source (all the clouds were evenly lit) looked more like something had exploded on the ground and lit up the clouds, although this makes no sense either. Green?