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High Number Of Lightning Strikes
TAMPA - The brightly colored satellite image of the storm that swept across the Tampa Bay region early this morning included a tally of lightning strikes. Between 12:30-1:30 a.m., nearly 4,000 bolts of lightning were recorded. That's unusual, said Leigh Spann, a forecaster with WFLA News Channel 8 as she watched the image this morning. "If we get 1,000, we say, that's a lot." Meteorologists with the National Weather Service in Ruskin said if you count lightning strikes off shore, there was twice that number of lightning strikes. Weather service meteorologist Jennifer McNatt said the peak lightning time was between 6-7 a.m. "We had 7,000 strikes," she said. That included the entire front, which stretched mostly to the south of the Bay area, out into the Gulf of Mexico. During that time, just over land, there were 5,000 strikes, she said. Between midnight and 1 a.m. today, just over the central peninsula, stretching from Fort Myers to Polk County, "we had over 9,000 strikes, including an area about 30 miles offshore," she said. Seems like a lot, she said, but, We're in Florida. I wouldn't say that's extreme [for a storm of that strength]. That was a pretty solid line." Some may have slept through the violent storm that caused some minor damage to homes and fences and left thousands without electricity for several hours — many of whom remained powerless for most of the day. But what people will remember most about the midnight storm, besides the pounding rain, is the thunder and lightning. The string of thunderstorms — part of the massive system that slammed Alabama and Mississippi over the weekend — moved through the Tampa Bay area Sunday night and this morning. It packed strong winds and some reports of tornados, although they remained unconfirmed.
