Winter Thunderstorms- Do they occur where you live? (climate, snowy, average)

[The East Frisian]

I've noticed in the past years, that they seem to appear more often here in Northern Germany, than 10 or 20 year ago. In the past ten years there has been usually at least one winter month where thunder could be heard.
During the winter 2011/2012 i could experience thunder in every winter month and the most noticable one was December 2011, where i could hear thunderstorms on six days, this is even rare in the summer months when we get about 3-4 days on average.

Most of the time those thunderstorms are accompanied by rain or hail though, there were only a few events when we had a winter thunderstorm with snow: March 2008 (on Easter Sunday), December 2010 and once in December 2011. I can also recall a snow thunderstorm in December in the 90s though i don't know the exact year anymore which appeared in the middle of the night at 2:30 a.m.

[dunno what to put here]

Rarely. They occur in some parts of the UK though. I'm trying to think of the last winter storm here, and I'm not remembering anything.

[miamihurricane555]

yeah whenever their is a strong arctic cold front diving south and passes over the gulf it will often produce a squalline that will cause severe weather. Here is a video of one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=dPNAWI7asCA

[Satellite_Anthem]

It does happen occasionally with the more intense storms off the Pacific, like December 2006 (Hannukah Eve Windstorm), and we can get squall lines that bring brief wind, small hail, and lightning once or so every winter.

Also, there was thundersnow in November 2006 and November 2010.

[tärnajokk]

Rarely and it seems they don't occur as often as in northwest germany (assuming your observations are right)... But in the winter of 2011/2012 we also had 2 or 3 days with winter thunderstorms...

[overdrive1979]

Rarely. maybe once every two winters, and most of them are weak, so I could hear one or two thunderclap in it.
They rarely occur with post-frontal showers of some cold fronts.

[The East Frisian]

Originally Posted by tärnajokk

Rarely and it seems they don't occur as often as in northwest germany (assuming your observations are right)... But in the winter of 2011/2012 we also had 2 or 3 days with winter thunderstorms...

I do recall the 5th January 2012 that was when the storm "Andrea" tracked over larger parts of Germany, there were several lines of thunderstorms over Western Germany and later also over Southern Germany in the morning hours, which were also quite strong according to media.

I assume you live in the southern parts of Germany? So winter thunderstorms there must be indeed very rare, but here near the North Sea coast they seem to happen more often, in fact in the evenings of the first half of December 2011, i could see lightning flashes over the North Sea almost every evening, very weird for this time of year.. but also quite cool.

For the winter season 2012/2013 i could observe three thunderstorm days, two in December and one in February, January was free of thunderstorms.

[Ariete]

They do happen, but usually they're weak, and as it's often cloudy, snowy or rainy and the thunder might be over open sea, they are sometimes hard to detect. Happens somewhere around the Gulf of Finland every year, but they're mostly local. After January the probability drops significantly, and February-April is usually 100% thunder-free.

[micC]

We're lucky if we get a halfway decent summer thunderstorm, here.

A winter one probably isn't unprecedented, but extremely rare, to be sure.

[tärnajokk]

Originally Posted by The East Frisian

I assume you live in the southern parts of Germany? So winter thunderstorms there must be indeed very rare, but here near the North Sea coast they seem to happen more often, in fact in the evenings of the first half of December 2011, i could see lightning flashes over the North Sea almost every evening, very weird for this time of year.. but also quite cool.

I live in western Germany (Westerwald) so not exactly in the south, but our climate is certainly a bit different from the climate at the North Sea Coast, probably especially regarding this point...