I just called my 71-year-old dad, who is from Biloxi, to ask if there is thunder and lightning during hurricanes, and he says no, not really.
On the other hand, he says that hurricanes can last for a very long time if they are moving slow.
I think the thunder and lightning must be on the perimeter, or maybe way up in the sky...I heard it with my own ears, shortly before the thing came in on us.
And it did come in on us, we were in the north eye wall, in the north quadrant. A guy on our block measured wind speeds of 220 mph on his home anemometer, before it blew away. The NHC bought one like his and tested it when they heard about that. They said it wasn't that accurate at those kind of velocities, but agreed that it meant the minimum wind on our block was 175 mph, no one knows how much higher it went.
I'd like to ask a meteorologist about that lightning question and how it associates with a hurricane. I'm sure there must be some association, since I heard it. But I am not aware of sky to ground lightning strikes during the storm. I couldn't see out anyway, had my place really boarded up.
I found this:
"It was a natural collaboration, and Molinari and Idone, and their co-workers Paul Moore and Ronald Henderson, chose Hurricane Andrew, one of the most intense hurricanes in U.S. history, as their first joint research project.
To "look" at lightning during that hurricane in August 1992, they gathered the records of all lightning strikes recorded by the network within 300 kilometers of the center of the storm.
Andrew took a path across the southern tip of Florida and then moved northwest across the Gulf of Mexico before striking Louisiana. For most of its path across the Gulf of Mexico, Andrew was within the range of the network.
The locations of the 11,765 recorded lightning strikes were then superimposed on satellite images of the hurricane to determine what, if any, correlations could be made between lightning activity and hurricane cloud structure.
Much of what they found, says Molinari, was not surprising.
Most of the lightning occurred in the outer rainbands of Andrew, the area more than 125-150 kilometers from the center. This area of a hurricane is known to have the kinds of weather conditions conducive to producing lightning. There's a lot of "convective" instability, in other words, circulating air currents, updrafts and downdrafts.
Also not surprising was the virtual absence of lightning at the very center, or eye, of the storm.
Considerably more surprising and intriguing was what they discovered about the eyewall, the wall of clouds around the eye.
The eyewall, explains Molinari, is the heart of a hurricane, its driving force. It has driving winds, the storm's heaviest precipitation, and big, tall clouds. Frequent lightning might be expected in such an environment.
And in fact, Molinari and Idone found that there were outbreaks of significant amounts of lightning in the eyewall. But the outbreaks were episodic, preceded and followed by long periods of virtually no lightning. And most intriguing, says Molinari, was the fact that the three main episodes of lightning in the eyewall occurred just before, or as, Andrew intensified.
here:
http://www.albany.edu/feature/lightning/ In fact, Andrew *was* intensifying in the Gulf Stream, when I heard the lightning. I can tell you it spooked me, hearing it, knowing what was coming.