IRISH NEWSWATCH: “How much lightning occurs in tropical cyclones?” – National Weather Service/National Hurricane Center
Ironically, while lightning is one weather-related danger that can reliably bring a football game to a halt, apparently lightning is not as common in hurricanes. Yet, as seen with #NotreDame vs. North Carolina State, lightning in a hurricane is not unheard of.
Playing in Raleigh, N.C., amidst the advancing fringes of Hurricane Matthew, Notre Dame and North Carolina State already were battling driving rains, high winds and standing water on a natural grass field at Finley-Carter Stadium. Then they had a half-hour delay to the start of the second half due to lightning.
Will the game come to a halt again?
According to the National Weather Service, featuring comments by an expert from the National Hurricane Center, lightning can be slightly more likely, or perhaps less unlikely, the further out one gets out into the fringes of the hurricane.
Surprisingly, not much lightning occurs in the inner core (within about 100 km or 60 mi) of the tropical cyclone center. Only around a dozen or less cloud-to-ground strikes per hour occur around the eyewall of the storm, in strong contrast to an overland mid-latitude mesoscale convective complex which may be observed to have lightning flash rates of greater than 1000 per hour maintained for several hours.
Hurricane Andrew’s eyewall had less than 10 strikes per hour from the time it was over the Bahamas until after it made landfall along Louisiana, with several hours with no cloud-to-ground lightning at all (Molinari et al. 1994).
However, lightning can be more common in the outer cores of the storms (beyond around 100 km or 60 mi) with flash rates on the order of 100s per hour.
This lack of inner core lightning is due to the relative weak nature of the eyewall thunderstorms. Because of the lack of surface heating over the ocean ocean and the “warm core” nature of the tropical cyclones, there is less buoyancy available to support the updrafts. Weaker updrafts lack the super-cooled water (e.g. water with a temperature less than 0° C or 32° F) that is crucial in charging up a thunderstorm by the interaction of ice crystals in the presence of liquid water (Black and Hallett 1986). The more common outer core lightning occurs in conjunction with the presence of convectively-active rainbands (Samsury and Orville 1994). …
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