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Let’s say you’re headed into the high Wind Rivers or Uintas or Sangre de Cristos (one heck of a thunderstorm factory) for the day, or the week. Fieldmarks of a Mountain Thunderstormĭo you know what to look for in a mountain storm weather system? Currents converging in the lee of an obstructing peak may pile into a thunderhead, too.
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A valley or gorge can channel airflow upslope to the same effect. Thermals rising up the shoulders of a mountain peak may converge at the summit and force up an air parcel to condensation level. An air mass shunted up a mountainside can (through what meteorologists call orographic lifting) form clouds and precipitation. These low-albedo zones may “seed” the local atmosphere with the instability for a storm.īesides simple heating of elevated land from solar insolation, mountain terrain can brew up storms. In the mountains, this means outcrops of darker rock (say, basalt) or subalpine conifer woods will heat up faster and more intensely than, for instance, pale granite or snowfields. Lighter-colored materials boast greater albedo, and therefore tend to be cooler than dark-colored ones. Albedo refers to an object’s relative ability to reflect sunlight: the higher the albedo, the more reflective the surface. Here it’s worth sparing a few sentences to the concept of albedo (not libido, mind you, though it’s easy enough to make the Freudian slip). Most basic, again, is simple convection: Ground heated by the sun warms the air above it and causes it to ascend, potentially to the level where its water vapor condenses into clouds. Mountains generate such storms through a variety of processes. Mountains in summer are all but guaranteed to deliver intense t-storms.Ī weather front may drive thunderstorms into your high-elevation playground, but here we’re mostly going to be focused on more local, “single-cell” disturbances: genuine mountain thunderstorms spawned in (and by) the high country. The other is enough moisture to allow the creation of a cloud deep enough to make a thunderhead: in other words, deep enough to form ice crystals in its crown and to have enough precipitation swirling around in updrafts and downdrafts to electrify the whole affair and spark lightning. This creates the atmospheric instability to allow that mountain-heated air to rise ( convection), and that rising air provides one of two key ingredients for storm formation. Why are mountains such reliable stages for summer t-storms? Well, lots of reasons, but the simplest is that these high prongs and tables of rock heat up in the strong summer sun and warm the air above them to a temperature greater than the surrounding atmosphere. Head above timberline unprepared, or not sufficiently humble, and you can find yourself in perilous straits on any given afternoon. Mountains in summer are essentially storm nurseries. These mountain ramblers aren’t just treated to brilliant sunshine and verdant alpine landscapes: They also find themselves up in the heights during prime thunderstorm season. Summertime opens up the high country to day hikers, backpackers, rock climbers, mountaineers, wildflower junkies, birdwatchers, stargazers, pilgrims, truth-seekers, and all manner of other visitors and refugees from the lowlands.