Yellow warning for lightning issued

[xmetman]

I don't think I've ever seen a yellow warning just for lightning so this a first for me.

Perhaps the brave forecaster who issued the lightning warning - and not one for the accompanying heavy rain - is either supremely confident that those white pixels in the latest radar image won't cause flash flooding or he is colour blind. 

I can't understand how the Met Office can be so pedantic - marking one warning area thunderstorm and another just lightning - and don't tell me it's all to do with impacts!

[xmetman]

Another Edinburgh thunderstorm - one thing about it is that they are moving quite quickly.

[xmetman]

Blitzortung have a new feature - something called a lightning vector map...

[Metman2012]

Well this was the news release about lightning warnings - make of it what you will...

[Freddie]

On Saturday, 29 June 2019 15:38:03 UTC+1, xmetman wrote:

I don't think I've ever seen a yellow warning just for lightning so this a first for me.

Perhaps the brave forecaster who issued the lightning warning - and not one for the accompanying heavy rain - is either supremely confident that those white pixels in the latest radar image won't cause flash flooding or he is colour blind.

It's elevated convection with a deep dry layer underneath, so lightning likely to be frequent, and there will be much evaporation below cloudbase, rendering radar colours a bit misleading.

I can't understand how the Met Office can be so pedantic - marking one warning area thunderstorm and another just lightning - and don't tell me it's all to do with impacts!

Probably the lower troposphere is moister here, making the impacts more typical of "standard" thunderstorms.  I am guessing at this though!

--
Freddie
Dorrington
Shropshire
115m AMSL
http://www.hosiene.co.uk/weather/
Stats for the month so far: https://www.hosiene.co.uk/weather/statistics/201906JUN.xlsx

[xmetman]

Well the rain was reaching the ground here - moderate for about half an hour with one peel of thunder - but we were on the edge of a cell that ran northeast across Inverness. Plenty of Twitter evidence of very heavy rain across Fife earlier on too. It's thundering again now but as I'm in the bath I can't see if it's raining!

[xmetman]

I notice that there was 18mm of rain in one hour at Kirkcaldy this afternoon easily enough to cause flash flooding problems.

https://apps.sepa.org.uk/rainfall/

The point I'm trying to make is that there's no point differentiating between a yellow warning area for thunderstorms over NE England and one for lightning over southern and eastern Scotland for today, when as far as I could see (before having my tea and jumping in the bath) there was more imaginary rain over Scotland than anywhere else. Just issue a thunderstorm warning almost invariably they go hand in hand - and please don't remind me of July 1984 and the lightning storm that set York Minster on fire, I was observing that night at Binbrook and do realise that you can get electrical storms without much if any rain, but that wasn't what was happening this afternoon judging by the rainfall figures from the SEPA site. The rainfall wasn't as heavy as earlier this week at either Edinburgh or Stirling but why try to split hairs.

There is some kind of vague parallel with how warnings have now become some kind of strange art form with the senior forecasters at the Met Office, just as the analysis charts have gradually got more convoluted over the last 20 years or so as well. ALL I can think is that they all must have far too much time on their hands.

[George in Edinburgh]

I spent much of the day outdoors watching a football tournament at Livingston. Despite what the radar showed no precipitation was reaching the ground and no lightning either (thank goodness). Back home the thunder show rolled into town at 1700 GMT with a noisy thunderstorm around 1800 GMT. Total precipitation 7 mm.

George in Swanston, Edinburgh

www.swanstonweather.co.uk

[xmetman]

You could argue that the maximum hourly rate was no higher that 12mm here at Gairnshiel where the rainfall total was just shy of 40mm. But the thunderstorm for northeast England and SE Scotland was for flash flooding with totals of only 20-30 mm. If you look carefully at the SEPA map there were numerous reports from towns in that range including Kirkcaldy, Dundee and west of Aberdeen.

The forecast thunderstorm area was extended much too far south if you look at the sferic report for yesterday missing NE England almost entirely. 

The lightning area when compared to the thunderstorm warning area is very oddly delineated, with the eastern boundary of the thunderstorm area extended many miles into the North Sea, whilst the lighting area in contrast is hard clipped around the coastline as if places on the Moray and Aberdeenshire coast (with all those links golf courses) would be spared any flashes of lightning at all.

 Here's my estimate of rain, real or imaginary for yesterday afternoon.

[Trevor Harley]

And curiously in Dundee, in the lightning zone, we had plenty of thunder, but no noticeable lightning.

There was a power cut in the city centre for four hours in the evening though, so perhaps the lightning did have an impact. I'm not sure what the impact of thunder alone is though - a startle response?

Trevor

[Freddie]

I can see the thinking behind why they partitioned the warning zones as such - but as you point out it was incorrect on verification.

[Len]

This had me thinking about the continuos lightning we had for over an hour in Plymouth 26 May 2017.

Hardly any rain, just muffled thunder, and only one ground strike as I remember.

It was all cloud to cloud stuff and at medium levels.

Incredible light show.

It threw it down with rain for all of 20 secs here in Wembury and there was no flooding in Plymouth.

Having thought about this, the Met office appear confident they can forecast such an event and just warn for lightning.

Convection was not paticularly deep on this occasion so no classic Cb situation which would no doubt need a warning for flooding.

Len

Wembury