A massive F5 tornado ripped through Moore, Oklahoma, yesterday, leveling entire neighborhoods and left a path of destruction in its wake.
Tornadoes are both fascinating and fearsome. While we know much about tornadoes from decades of research by top scientists, much remains to be learned about how tornadoes form and intensify. One possible clue could be lightning.
Our Total Lightning Network – the largest in the world for detecting both cloud-to-ground strikes and the lightning that stays in the clouds – lets us “see” into severe weather, including the Moore tornado, as never before. While we typically see severe thunderstorms produce about 25 -75 lightning flashes per minute, this monster storm produced over 140 flashes per minute.
You can see a timelapse video of the lightning captured by our Total Lightning Network during the Moore tornado: