SYDNEY — While most people were fast asleep early Wednesday morning, Mother Nature was hard at work creating a lightning show above Cape Breton Island.
SaltWire Meteorologist Cindy Day said the thunder and lightning storm was seen in Halifax between 10-11 p.m. on Tuesday and spread to Cape Breton Wednesday morning between 1-3:30 a.m.
“There seems to be three lines that came through,” Day said about the Cape Breton portion of the storm. “There was a line, a bit of a lull, a couple of cells and a bit of a lull.”
The thunder and lightning that came with the three lines was part of a frontal wave moving through that was occluding or being blocked.
This occluding, Day said, gives the storm more energy and when that happens a thunderstorm is fuelled by the two systems coming together.
“The thunderstorms were more powerful than maybe they have been in recent similar scenarios. It was that perfect storm of these two systems coming together and slowing down a little bit as they crossed Cape Breton. It was a good sound and light show.”
Over some Cape Breton skies, many described the flashes they saw as ‘heat lightning.’ Day said some also refer to that as dry lightning, while her grandmother often called it summer lightning.
“What they are seeing, meteorologically, is cloud to ground lighting that is happening in a thunderstorm that is very far away. In the case of this so-called heat lightning, you are not hearing the thunder, you are seeing the flashes. The storm itself, the cell, is many kilometres away so you can see the light but the sound doesn’t travel as far as the light does.”
Such situations where two weather systems come together happens somewhere every couple of weeks. Day said the one over Cape Breton and eastern Nova Scotia happened when a warm front and a cold front stalled against a blocking high off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.
It’s the cold front that triggered the thunder and lightning.
That system is now travelling over western Newfoundland.
Weather on the way for Cape Breton will be of the windy variety through until Friday morning featuring northwest gusts from 60-70 km/h under sunny skies.
The remnants of Hurricane Laura will bring 60-75 mm of rain beginning Saturday night and into Sunday morning.
