For Those In Northern Climes

Have no fear, winter is soon to end.   Spring is just around the corner...

 

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.