Abstract
An exceptionally rare super-cell thunderstorm occurred on the morning hours of October 25th 2015 in the Eastern Mediterranean. The storm developed off the Egyptian coastline near Alexandria and moved north-west, crossing the Israeli coast just north of Tel-Aviv at 0700 UTC. Rapidly developing, deep convective cells, with thunderclouds exhibiting cloud top temperatures colder than −70 °C (17 km) and radar reflectivity cores >65 dBz at 12 km, were accompanied by intensive lightning activity, severe hail, downbursts and massive rain rates. Between 0500 and 0900 UTC, more than 28,440 cloud-to-ground lightning strokes were registered by the lightning detection system of the Israeli Electrical Corporation. Additionally, weak strokes detected with peak currents lower the ±5 kA were classified as intracloud, and constituted additional 29,878 strokes; the storm's total for the 4-h period was 58,318 strokes, exceeding the total annual amount for the entire country. The maximum total stroke rate between 0700 and 0800 UTC exceeded 500 strokes per minute. Synoptic analysis and WRF simulations suggest that electrification processes were enhanced through a combination of dynamic factors and dust induced invigoration of microphysical processes, leading to the prodigious amount of lightning.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 105165 |
| Journal | Atmospheric Research |
| Volume | 247 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Jan 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research is supported by the Israel Science Foundation and the National Chinese Science Foundation grant 2460/17. Lightning data obtained from the Israeli Electrical Corporation (IEC) and thanks are due to Mr. Evgeny Kats and Mr. Haim Lerman for their valuable assistance. We wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their most helpful comments and suggestions. Prof. Yoav Yair was the leading PI, who supervised the research from the onset. He initiated and conceptualized the research, suggested the research hypothesis, acquired the needed data. He wrote the initial manuscript, performed the revisions and phrased the response to reviewers. Dr. Barry Lynn participated in the conceptualization of the research and did all the programming of the WRF model. He did all modeling runs and did the factor separation, made all visualizations of the model output and participated in analysis and write-up of the results. Mr. Mordecai Yaffe analyzed the lightning data and produced lightning maps and statistics. Dr. Baruch Ziv conducted the synoptic analysis of the event and produced the weather maps. Dr. Yaacov Shpund assisted in the programming of the SBM model.
Funding Information:
This research is supported by the Israel Science Foundation and the National Chinese Science Foundation grant 2460/17 . Lightning data obtained from the Israeli Electrical Corporation (IEC) and thanks are due to Mr. Evgeny Kats and Mr. Haim Lerman for their valuable assistance. We wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their most helpful comments and suggestions.
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