Weather in the Midwest

We had some nice thunderstorms this evening and I was reminded of how different they are in the Midwest, as compared to the East. I grew up in Upstate New York and thought I knew about thunderstorms until I moved to Iowa as an adult. In my first summer in Iowa, I discovered that whatever electrical storms I had seen while growing up, they weren't Thunderstorms.

In the Midwest, these storms are a whole different beast. I had never seen what I can only call "horizontal lightning" before. I remember walking across a parking lot one evening as a storm was approaching, and suddenly something shot over my head. I ducked involuntarily and looked up to see lightning jump from purplish-black cloud to cloud, not ground-ward, and moving laterally across the sky above me. It was very impressive and I hadn't seen lightning like that before. That was just the first difference; even cloud to ground lightning in the Midwest was grander and more vivid. It didn't take long to become much more attuned to weather and weather changes than I had living back East.