If you’ve got some free time over the next hour or so, take a walk outside and look south-southeast. It’s not heat lightning, but lightning from storms pretty far away. As of 9:45pm, a thunderstorm is over I-81 near Chambersburg. The lightning from that cell is visible back to our studios here in Johnstown. [...]
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When Thunder Roars… Go Indoors! I missed it by a day. Not a big deal. Last week was Lightning Safety Awareness Week in West-Central PA and today, I got a few minutes to review the information provided by the National Weather Service in State College. According to the website, 55 people are killed [...] Thundersnow is real… what about a snownado? (PS. This picture is just for fun.) It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while there’s a phenomenon where you have snow but you hear thunder and see lightning. This is called thundersnow. The question is… since there’s thundersnow, can there be a snownado? [...]  Image Courtesy: Monica in Nanty Glo (July 17, 2010) Most of us know that lightning travels faster than thunder (because light travels faster than sound). Well, today’s weather trivia question asks: How much faster is lightning than thunder? a) 5 times b) 40,106 times c) 882,353 times Find out the answer after the jump… (Read More) It’s hard to beleive that we’ve posted 1,000 stories on the weather blog. We started with a page on the main WJACTV.com website. That didn’t have enough adaptability, so we moved to Blogger and later to WordPress. We’ve been on WordPress for a while now. This is officially our 1,000th post according to the stats system that we use. I have a feeling that we hit 1,000 a while ago, but this is a great opportunity to look back and see some of the cooler topics we’ve talked about over the last 3 years. Below the jump is a list of 13 categories with some of the cooler topics. You can click on the category to go to a list of the posts about that topic. Click in for the list. (Read More)  Filed in: Atmospheric Optics, Baseball, Election, Experiment, lightning, Numerology, Out and About, School Visit, Time Lapse, Tornado, Weather Kid, WX Factor |  Comments: None yet |  Share:
 Leon the Lion Lightning Safety I’d be remiss if I didn’t include the word shocking in a post about lightning, so I’ll get it out of the way in the first sentence. June 20 through 26 is lightning awareness week and with all the storms we’ve had, it’s probably pretty timely. Lightning is not something that you want to mess with. Leon the lion in the picture to the right will highlight some things that you shouldn’t be doing when there’s thunder and lightning. Kevin Carter of our sister station, WTOV-9 in Steubenville, Ohio covers the rest in a post from their blog. Click into this post for more on that. (Read More) I like Bing.com. I’ve said that before. I don’t know if their search compares to Google’s, but it gets the job done. I have been using it for a while and I continue to use it. One of the big reasons I still use it is because of the cool images that show up daily. Sometimes it’s a picturesque landscape or a sports stadium or even this…  Bing.com Lightning Image (June 15, 2010) This is the image that showed up on June 15, 2010. There are also places in the image where you can mouse-over and get cool information and links. Here’s what they said… (Read More) It’s been an active couple of days in the area weather-wise. We had lots of lightning and thunderstorms on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. On Friday, I captured this image on our Johnstown tower cam. Lightning Over Johnstown (June 4, 2010) Erupting volcanoes produce lightning, but scientists aren’t sure why. Check out the cool picture of the erupting Eyjafjallajokull volcano: Eyjafjallajokull volcano, Courtesy: Olivier Vandeginste More from spaceweather.com: It is well known that volcanoes produce lightning, but scientists aren’t sure why. The underlying mechanism is likely to be some form of triboelectric charging–that is, [...] Two of the newest tools in our arsenal are Lightning Tracker and something called StrikeZone! Let’s start by talking about lightning tracker first.
Just like the title suggests, Lightning Tracker will track the lightning and let you know where the most recent strikes are. The colored bolts that you’ll see on the screen indicate the age of the lightning. The newest strikes are white and the oldest ones are red. Take a look at the image below to see what I mean…  Lightning Tracker at 10:00 AM on Monday 9/28 Well, I’m back from my trip and it was a lot of fun. The only wrinkle in the trip came on day 1 when we flew from Pittsburgh to Chicago. It was a bumpy ride. We hit turbulence and some people were pretty scared. It was a rare occurrence and it shouldn’t stop you [...] Here’s a few photos from storm chaser Ron Shawley. The pictures were taken last night near the Chickaree area of Cambria County:
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 Don’t forget to send your photos to [...] NWS Lightning Safety Week is June 21-27, and here’s some important info from the weather service: Seems the Vortex team have perhaps left their mission a bit late in the season, although a possible opportunity may present soon. That said I feel ambivalent about it as new twisters can cause folks damage even though the team wants them! I hope they get at least one opportunity however. Also hoping to [...] Weather has been so calm in the Alleghenies over the past couple of days that we need something to liven it up. Check out this video of lightning hitting the Sears Tower. Pretty amazing! http://www.wjactv.com/video/19271154/ Here’s some video of the South Carolina wildfires. http://www.wjactv.com/video/19267579/ Finally, we had some problems of our own on Sunday [...] It sounds like a pretty good movie title for a kids movie, doesn’t it? Well, I think that’s what the NWS was hoping for when they decided to use it as a way to dispel lightning myths and inject lightning wisdom into the general public. To see the movie poster they came up with and some tips on how to stay safe when dealing with lightning, click the link below… (It’s definitely worth a view!) I already knew about it, but did a little digging tonight to find the best way to describe the term ‘heat lightning.’ Like normal, my first and only stop was Professor Jeff Haby’s website The Weather Prediction. Heat lightning is REAL LIGHTNING! The best way to describe it is lightning without the thunder. When [...] Filed in: Early Warning Doppler 6, lightning, theweatherprediction.com | Comments: None yet | Share:
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