Thunderstorm season is in full swing across the country and with it comes the threat of lightning. Unfortunately, there’s lots of bad information floating around about this weather hazard. The Lee Weather Team is here to help!
This week, the meteorologists debunk the top five lightning myths and share their advice on the best ways to stay safe during a thunderstorm. They also debut a new segment on the podcast, answering your weather questions. It’s an “electric” episode you don’t want to miss!
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Have a question for the meteorologists? Call 609-272-7099 and leave a message. You might hear your question and get an answer on a future episode! You can also email questions to podcasts@lee.net.
About the Across the Sky podcast
The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:
Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Across the Sky, our National We Enterprise Weather podcast. I'm Matt Holiner, covering weather for all of the Midwest websites and apps from Chicago. And I'm joined by my fellow meteorologist Joe Martucci in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Sean Sublette in Richmond, Virginia. Our fourth co-host of the show, Kirsten Lang, is still on maternity leave.
But if you follow her on social media, it looks like she's doing just fine now, spending time with the new baby. Now, technically, it's not astronomical or official summer yet, but it is June and meteorological summer has begun. And that means it's thunderstorm season and it's the lightning in those thunderstorms that we want to focus on. For this episode.
We're going to talk lightning safety. Share some lightning stories. But the main thing we're here to do is bust some lightning myths. Now, there are quite a few out there, but we've narrowed it down to five that seem to be the most common. So without further ado, here's our top five lightning myths. And that number five, when it gets real hot, a special kind of lightning with no thunder occurs called heat.
Lightning. Oh, boy. Guys, which one of you wants to tackle this or I'll jump all over. All right, guys. John, you sound more enthusiastic about this. I want you to take it. I totally am. Because I'm an old man. Because I remember this. Because I remember in the seventies being a kid here in Virginia and seeing the flashes out in the in the distance.
And, you know, my parents are all that heat. Lightning. Oh, what does that mean? Oh, it's just heat. Lightning. And, you know, they didn't know. So it's okay for people to not know. But now we do know what's going on. I mean, that, you know, it's 45, 50 years ago. It's just thunderstorm that's too far away to hear the to hear the thunder.
I mean, obviously, you're going to see lightning from a much longer distance at night because there's no other light around. The sun's not out. So you could see the flash from lightning from dozens and dozens of miles away. I think I've told this story before. There was one time I got out of a baseball game, and when I was working Lynchburg, I saw Flash on the eastern horizon.
I'm like said a thunderstorm. And I checked my radar. I'm like, yeah, it was a thunderstorm 110 miles away. I clearly you're not going to hear that thunder. But yeah, I think it's one of these things that people are like they expect to hear thunder if they see lightning. And for them, it's really tough to to imagine one without the other.
But yeah, it's just it's just a thunderstorm, those too far away. And that happens most often during the summer. A lot of times like I'm coming back from work, I'm on this road called the Garden State