Watch: Lightning inside Hurricane Dorian, now Category 3
Dorian strengthened into a category 3 hurricane on Friday morning, posing a significant threat to Florida and the northwestern Bahamas, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
Dorian was located about 445 miles east of the northwestern Bahamas with maximum sustained winds of 115 miles per hour, the Miami based center said.
An updated interactive tracking map can be found here.
Additional strengthening is forecast, and Dorian is anticipated to remain an extremely dangerous major hurricane while it approaches the Florida peninsula early next week, the NHC said.
The destructive force is not without a strange beauty, as shown by the satellite loops put up on social media by Dakota Smith, a meteorologist and scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
You can see the ferocious, monster storm churning away in the Caribbean, with fluffy white cloud tops billowing all about. And then, some surprises: flashes of brightness from lightning strikes within the hurricane.
People don’t normally consider lightning as being part of a hurricane, but Smith said we shouldn’t be surprised by it.
“Yeah this is common, especially in the outer bands of a hurricane,” he told CNN. “People don’t normally associate lightning with tropical systems. I think that’s mainly because they have a lot less lightning than your typical strong inland thunderstorm.”
In his Twitter posts, Smith not only shows the satellite loops of the storm, but he also explains how the lightning is created in the storm. He said it’s “associated with deep convection (the circular motion of warm and cool air) that kicked off after sunset.”
The-CNN-Wire
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