Lightning has an odor

Kidsandliz went on a bit of a rant said
10

Was driving 2 days (1054 miles) through a lot of rain. Yesterday I went through several tornado warning areas with the high winds, driving rain and couldn’t see the road…

So was south of Memphis and driving into the storm. The lightening was amazing. Tons of it lighting up the entire sky, road, trees ahead, everything, with this odd shade white light. Wrecked the night vision over and over it was that bright and sometimes was so close and followed each other so fast it made me wish I had sunglasses on. It was barely raining yet. The radio was blaring tornado warnings again and again (had happened earlier in the day too) and the wind made it dangerous to pass a truck or go very fast, not to mention, eventually as I entered the storm there was probably 4 or so inches of rain in about 60 minutes (tv said 4-5"). As a result lightening lit up everything, including the sky. That was helpful looking for funnel clouds. I didn’t see any but about 30 min due east of where I was a tornado did touch down.

Pretty much solid lightening of the full light the entire sky and ground variety (eg no lightening streaks seen) for over an hour. And part way into this I started to smells something that resembled an electrical fire. Really similar but was slightly different. And I finally realized there had been so much lightening I could smell it in the air. Seriously cool. Who knew. I asked a friend of mine today about it (in meteorology) and he said that yes you can smell the effects of lightening under rare circumstances.

That also explains why some cats I had (that died 21 and 19 years ago), always seemed to know when storms were getting close. The smell. A water spout had come ashore (when I lived in costal VA, Norfolk area), landed in my backyard by the back fence and damaged the fence and 10 houses behind me. Anyway the cats has been on the table by the window and took off at a dead run with belly dragging on the ground, tail flat behind them a split second prior to the house being engulfed in a lightening ball.

That was so weird. Solid pure opaque white light that you couldn’t see through blocking all the windows. Thinking about it there was the same smell. Of course the thunder was immediate and shook things off the walls. Neighbor was on her porch and said the house vanished into a ball of white (lightening ball). Melted the lightening rod and no damage inside to anything except things that were shaken off the wall or off shelves.

So that is twice in my life that I could smell the lightening. Interesting experiences. Any one else experience that?