Lightning has an odor
10Was 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?
- 9 comments, 12 replies
- Comment
Lightning generates ozone, which has a metallic smell. (That’s the best way I can describe it.)
@werehatrack Yeah the smell isn’t quite metallic or electric.
It is called ozone. Not to be confused with Frozone.
@yakkoTDI
@yakkoTDI HAHAHA
That whole house being engulfed in a ball of lightning thing is pretty freaky. When I used to work high up in one of the towers downtown, there were lightning rods on every corner of the building right outside the windows. I used to wish I’d see lightning strike one, but the company moved before I ever did.
@djslack It would have been interesting to watch provided they were set up right and you were insulated enough from electrical flow.
As others have said, high voltage discharges generate ozone, which is what you smell. Probably similar to what you smelled if you ever walked into a Sharper Image store in a mall, with all the Ionic Breeze air purifiers going at once! (Those put out ozone as a side effect of generating negative ions, though so many running at once in a relatively small space might not be such a good idea.)
@PooltoyWolf That is correct. While ozone can work as a disinfectant and blocks UV, it’s also an irritant and is a component of smog.
@PooltoyWolf Well now I know never to get that kind of air purifier. LOL
@Kidsandliz Ionic air purifiers are perfectly fine, and very effective, when used properly! Just don’t put 10 of them in a single room LOL
Sounds like that must’ve been the most stressful, scary yet beautiful drive ever! I’m thinking most people might stop/pull over and wait for the storm to pass instead of driving through it, again, VERY scary and stressful!
I’ve never even heard of the smell of lightning nevermind experience it! What I do know is our cat has been smelling the air for the last two days! It’s been raining, tonight we had thunder and lightning and he’s been pushing himself in-between us to get his nose into the screen of the open window! It’s like he’s on a mission! We were just talking about it and wondering what the heck he was freaking out about. I’m betting now it’s just what you are talking about. Very interesting topic!
@Lynnerizer Clearly cats get early warnings we don’t due to their enhanced sense of smell (and I presume dogs and some other animals as well).
I think I barely missed a tornado coming home down i-30 just north of Hope one time, the rain suddenly got dramatically worse and the winds were actively trying to push me off the road. And there were lots and lots of bits of foliage going past my windshield. I could see about 50 yards of the road ahead of me, and that was all. On the way up that same highway, I had seen places where several large trucks had been blown off the road the night before.
@werehatrack I once nearly drove into a tornado. There was a tornado on the ground (went a zillion miles), I was working in a glass building about 2 miles from home. Decided to exit due to all the glass and no real away from the windows place. Was crossing the highway and saw it just north of me about 1/2 mile, but behind me, fortunately going parallel to me. Decided not to head north (actually only had two choices, north or stay on this street, had already passed the on ramp of the highway to head south), instead stayed on the street I was on with the radio on as it was talking about where it was which was pretty parallel to me and apparently was going faster than I was.
All of a sudden the wind picked up, big branches started to fall off of trees… Kept going as they now said it was going through the north side of the mall’s parking lot so I knew it was veering away from me. Headed north and turned into the street that lead to mine (they had said it was no longer on the ground). Once on that road saw it was ahead of me. Three times the swirl started to lower and then went back up. Had it lowered all the way it would have hit my house (was headed home to grab the cats and then was going to drive south (yeah probably not so smart). Instead another 1/2 mile away it lowered on the reservoir. Can’t remember if it chewed up boats or not but at least on that lake no houses would have been damaged.
I don’t remember smelling it, but I have heard it.
When we were kids my brother & I were in the basement during a thunderstorm. There were two small ground level windows up high on the wall. Lightning struck between the houses, just outside the window. Everything lit up pure white, through those small windows. And there was a loud sizzling, crackling sound simultaneous with the blinding light. It was immediately followed, by a fraction of a second, by the loudest thunderclap I’ve ever heard.
It was thrilling and terrifying! And as I gatherd my wits to say something to my little brother, I turned to see his heels disappearing up the staircase.
@blaineg Yeah that collection of noises and that opaque pure white light is pretty unique, scary and amazing at the same time. And the thunder when you are right there is, as you said, incredibly loud and makes everything shake like you are in a major earthquake.
The thread title promises tales of electrical storms, yet the text seems to deal with hair colorant???
@macromeh lightn up, eh?
I haven’t seen the word here yet, but there is another weather related smell, when it has rained just slightly a few miles away, and the wind is blowing towards you: petrichor.
You can kind of smell if it is going to rain about a half hour ahead of time as the winds blow the storm in, by smelling the petrichor scent. Most people know what it smells like, from a spring rain when you are standing outdoors in the first few moments of rainfall, but I had nose surgery to repair a deviated septum, and ever since then my sense of smell has been enhanced due to the change of airflow in my nose, and one of the superpowers I gained was the ability to smell the rain coming in about a half hour in advance, so I had decent warning to grab my umbrella.
The lightning smell is probably ozone though. Well, not exactly the ozone itself, but ozone acts kind of like bleach and attacks bacteria and stuff floating in the air to break back down into oxygen, so that not too much ozone remains. The smell is the bacteria and yeast in the air that has had its cell membrane destroyed by ozone, as well as the smell of the lightning directly frying bacteria in the air and burning it. That is why it smells both burnt and chemically, is that essentially you have burned bacterial cells alongside pool aroma from amines being formed by the ozone(not chloramine like a pool has, but similar amines)
@smerk85 thanks for the explanation of what makes up that smell. It is distinctive.