It's heavily snowing outside, and suddenly you hear a loud booming noise. You think to yourself, what could this be? Well, I am here to tell you that this, is called thundersnow.
Thundersnow is a rare phenomenon that many people may have experienced Monday. It happens because of temperature instability in a snowstorm usually when a warm front is moving in.
According to meteorologists, it is typically common in Western New York but usually rare in Michigan. Harold Dippman is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gaylord.
He said, "the most dominant thing that is associated with thundersnow would be lake effect snow. And usually that comes from those really well developed bigger bands that come off of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario into Western New York, where there's a ton of instability over the lake."
He also said that it is just like a thunderstorm in the summer, only it will, "occur when snow is falling instead of rain."
With the presence of thunder in the summer, there is usually lightning. This is no different when there is thundersnow in the winter. Harold said that usually it goes unseen because it doesn't typically strike the ground.
"Generally speaking, it's not a cloud to ground strike, because the instability is elevated. So it usually is just kind of limited to a cloud to cloud strike," he said.
Right now, the national weather service said weather models are predicting March will be colder month on average than normal.
