Have you noticed that all this footage of Hurricane Florence you are watching lacks spectacular thunder and lightning audio-visual?<\/p>\n
That’s because hurricanes don’t really have a lot of lightning. But why?<\/p>\n
The reason is that thunderstorms are up-down things, and hurricanes are round-and-round things. The updownness of winds in thunderstorms causes ice and water droplets to interact in a way not totally different from a balloon rubbing against a wool sweater, causing a charge differential to build up, with the upper parts of the forming thunderclouds being more positive than the lower parts (and the ground). Lightning is the discharge across that differential.<\/p>\n
That up-down dynamic does exist in hurricanes, and there is some lightning and thunder, just not much. Most of the energy dynamic in a thunderstorm is rapid uplift of air into the thunderhead, so the thunderstorm is all about forming a charge differential. Most of the energy dynamic in a hurricane is much larger scale, much more horizontal.<\/p>\n
It may be the case that lightning is most likely to develop along the eye wall of the strongest hurricanes. Emily, a 2005 Category 5 hurricane, was seen to have an unusual amount of lightning in the eye wall, and that prompted further research into the phenomenon. Katrina, Andrew and Rita had a lot of lighting around the eye. It has been suggested that lightning activity along the eye wall picks up when a strong hurricane is increasing in strength. So there is a hurricane-lightning link, but thunderstorms are major lightning machines.<\/p>\n
NASA Finds Intense Lightning Activity Around a Hurricane’s Eye<\/a><\/p>\n Maximum hurricane intensity preceded by increase in lightning frequency<\/a><\/p>\n