Why thunderstorms afternoon

Thunderstorm development Weather. The key components necessary for a thunderstorm to develop include moisture and instability in the atmosphere, and some type of trigger mechanism to initiate convection. The atmosphere is most unstable when there is much warmer air near the surface and much cooler air at the upper levels of the atmosphere. A few common triggers include fronts passing through, daytime heating, and temperatures cooling at the upper levels.

When warm moist air is unstable, it rises and expands. As the air rises rapidly, water vapor within the air starts to cool and thus releases heat. This is when cloud formation occurs, or when we say that condensation has begun. The air condenses forming a cloud, and continues to grow until it becomes a towering cumulus cloud, or what you would notice as your typical storm cloud. Cloud droplets within the cloud then begin to collide with one another, combining to become larger rain droplets, until the droplets are too large and must fall from the cloud as rain.

Ice particles within the cloud holding both positive and negative charges can then create lightning, and of course, thunder. During the summer months, the sun heats air near the surface more rapidly and to higher temperatures throughout the day. On days with less clouds in the sky temperatures can also rise to very high values.

Because of this daytime heating throughout the day, the late afternoon and evening hours are when radiational heating and instability are at their highest points, and thus there is a steep temperature gradient between the mid-levels and the Boundary Layer.

This daytime heating is often strong enough to completely overcome significant capping inversions, thus triggering Convective Available Potential Energy or CAPE that can spur up even severe thunderstorms. The intense heating that can occur during the daytime of the spring and summer months is very conducive for afternoon and evening thunderstorms. As the summer comes to a close, be sure to be aware of the potential for afternoon thunderstorms and the risks that come along with them.

To learn more about severe weather topics from around the globe, click here! AlabamaWX is pleased to partner with the Global Weather and Climate Center team for outstanding posts about our atmosphere. Tags: GWCC. Category : Partner News Stories. Thunderstorms are a weather phenomenon that occur and develop due to high amounts of moisture in the air along with warm air that is rising. These storms typically last less than thirty minutes and occur within a mile radius.

According to NOAA, in the United States nearly , thunderstorms occur each year, with ten percent of these storms becoming severe thunderstorms. To understand why thunderstorms occur more often during the warm months requires some understanding of thunderstorm basics.

Thunderstorms thrive under certain conditions. The two most basic elements that cause a thunderstorm to develop are:. Where does the thunder and lightning come from? The basic idea is that thunder clouds can become giant Van de Graaff generators and create huge charge separations within the cloud. Let's look at how it works. Clouds contain millions and millions of water droplets and ice particles suspended in the air. As the process of evaporation and condensation occurs, these droplets collide with other moisture that is condensing as it rises.

The importance of these collisions is that electrons are knocked off of the rising moisture, creating a charge separation. The newly knocked-off electrons gather at the lower portion of the cloud, giving it a negative charge. The rising moisture that has lost an electron carries a positive charge to the top of the cloud. As the rising moisture encounters colder temperatures in the upper cloud regions and begins to freeze, the frozen portion becomes negatively charged and the unfrozen droplets become positively charged.

At this point, rising air currents have the ability to remove the positively charged droplets from the ice and carry them to the top of the cloud. The remaining frozen portion either falls to the lower portion of the cloud or continues on to the ground.