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I was nearly 40 years old before I saw fireflies for the first time. I was sent back east to Washington DC for a conference. One evening I was wandering near one of the monuments when these tiny points of light started lighting up. I couldn’t figure out what they were until I got close enough and realized they were insects. That was also the trip where I first saw lightning, so it was a very enlightening trip ;-) My children still have never seen fireflies (or lightning), so I hope they stick around long enough till we can go east someday and see them.

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It's never occurred to me that there are places that don't get lightning storms. I'm guessing that also means you've never had the joy of getting your garden or car paint ruined by hail?

>don't get lightning storms

Wait are you calling a swarm of them a "lightning storm"? I thought pretty much everyplace gets lightning[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_lightning

it's like rain. a rain storm. monday sunny skies. tuesday light rain. wednesday it rains all day - we call that a rain storm. thursday a rain storm with lightning? we call that a thunderstorm (or less commonly lightning storm): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderstorm

Yeah, we never get thunderstorms.

Wow. It never occurred to me that this was possible in the US. I've seen lightning three days out of the last five.

We have fireflies (or lightning bugs) in the back yard, too. I remember there being a lot more of them when I was a child, though.

>Wow. It never occurred to me that this was possible in the US. I've seen lightning three days out of the last five.

Likewise, you learn something new every day :-)

https://xkcd.com/1053/

It was a very weird experience moving to the West Coast. One day there was some thunder off in the distance and I realized I hadn’t heard it in 6-7 months. Didn’t even know I was missing it.

There is almost never lightning in coastal northern California.

It makes me sad, having moved from DC where we had glorious thunderstorms.

Lightning happens all over but it is relatively rare on the US west coast, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. We had an actual thunderstorm in the fall of 2019 and everyone was talking about it for a couple of days after, it was so noteworthy.

I think dontbenebby is asking whether the person was using "lightning storm" in the commentt to refer to:

- a swarm of fireflies (aka "lightning bugs")

- a storm with thunder and lightning

Both are not normal in the Pacific Northwest.

I literally had no idea a swarm of fireflies is called a lightning storm. I also didn’t know they are called lightning bugs. TIL

That's the thing, I don't think a swarm of fireflies is called that. But I think that's what the question was asking :)

The last time we saw lightning in the Willamette Valley of Oregon there were multiple posts on the local reddit asking what the flashing light in the sky was. People thought it might be a gas explosion or aircraft.

Wow, that's just mindblowing to me. Do they also point at the sun and ask if it a god in a chariot of fire? Clearly asked in jest, but that's just how strange hearing about people not having the fortune of seeing lightning on a regular basis. (I'm clearly a fan of lightning, and have a collection of photos I've captured as a hobby)

> Lightning happens all over but it is relatively rare on the US west coast, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. We had an actual thunderstorm in the fall of 2019 and everyone was talking about it for a couple of days after, it was so noteworthy.

Thanks for this, descriptions like this help a lot more than raw stats, I had to hear a few sources of info say basically this before I grok-d it.

We get hail, but it has never been bigger than about 1/8 inch. Our climate just doesn’t have the right conditions to form lightning. Hail, sleet, snow, rain all still work properly.

There are places without lightning? How does that work, isn't it just caused by quick warm:cold transitions and don't these happen everywhere?

One of the main predictors is convective available potential energy, or the integrated amount of work that the upward (positive) buoyancy force would perform on a given mass of air (called an air parcel) if it rose vertically through the entire atmosphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convective_available_potential...

Lightning flash rate May 4, 1995 - December 31, 2013

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/85600/global-lightn...

Global lightning strikes from January 1998 to April 2015 from the NASA/MSFC Lightning Imaging Sensor on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite.

https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/lightning/images/browse/mission....

It looks pretty unlikely for a person anywhere to go 40 years without witnessing lightning from looking at these visualizations, honestly.

I'm living in an area which is pretty much in a dead zone on these graphs and have seen at least some lightning each year. Admittedly, most years only have pretty small bolts but that's a different story

It is absolutely possible if you live on an island in the Pacific Ocean such as Hawaii.

Born and grew up on Oahu and moved to the mainland when I was a teen. Can definitely say that while I saw bright flashes of light from lightning during hurricane season I never actually saw the bolts of lightning until moving away from Hawaii.

It just takes a few factors to bring someone's chances way down. For example:

- Someone who is indoors for the most lightning-active hours can easily bring their chance of seeing lightning way down [0]

- If you live in a dead zone, you can see 2+ orders of magnitude less lightning per year [0 and 1]

- People vary a lot in how much time they spend outdoors. Some people spend a half an hour outdoors each day, some spend five; there's another order of magnitude.

- If you live in a city or a valley, you often have a far more limited view as opposed to someone on a hill or flat land. If you live on the lower floors of an apartment building in a city, for example, you may only see the rest of your block, versus others that can see several square miles.

Just those four factors together and you've got a plausible several order of magnitude difference in how much lightning people see. I think it's totally possible there's a good chunk of the population that's never seen it.

[0] https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/4967/are-li...

[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/85600/global-lightn... (also referenced in gp)

Can anyone explain in simple terms why it seems that it occurs relatively frequently in the centers of continents and infrequently in the middle of the ocean?

Dry air is a good insulator so larger charge differentials can occur. Wet air isn't as good an insulator so charge doesn't build up. That is also why Lightning tends to happen during rain storms, the insulator breaks down and allows the charge to flow.

In the 8 years of me living in the Bay Area. I think I’ve seen lightning maybe twice in the area.

Maybe we don’t hand the warm cold transition? I also heard it has something to do with our clouds are always low and warm instead of high and cold, which apparently has something to do with making lightning. I really don’t know the reason our region doesn’t have lightning.

Bay Area doesn't really have lightning or thunderstorms. Makes me sad.

There's probably a market for guided Firefly tours, if they're entrepreneurial.

(I'll have to look into when they're supposed to come back, they're native to my area.)

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