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Comment by makerofspoons | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

>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.

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