What a shame! I missed the spectacular thunderstorms of Thursday, April 14. I have seen videos of the non-stop lightning and it looks really impressive, but I was on holiday so I didn’t see it myself. What’s even more depressing is that it was probably one of the last thunderstorms we’ll see before the long hot summer starts.
I used to think that everyone in Qatar liked thunderstorms. After all, not only do they bring a spectacular light display, but they also break the monotony of the endless sunshine. I realised that this wasn’t quite the case when I said to one of my colleagues at the beginning of April that I’d enjoyed driving into work during a thunderstorm. He laughed, until he realised I was serious.
I love thunderstorms because they’re such an impressive show of nature’s strength, but I wouldn’t want to get too close. In 1959, a US fighter pilot in the skies above the US state of Virginia got into difficulties and had to bail out during a thunderstorm. He hurtled towards the ground, until his parachute deployed automatically at 10,000 feet. Disastrously this was too early; the Lieutenant Colonel was still within the cloud and his parachute was caught in an updraft. He was dragged back up into the storm, where he was thrown about in the cloud like a rag doll. He was pounded by golf-ball sized hail, temporarily blinded by lightning, frozen to the core by the extreme cold and in fear he may drown as his soaking parachute wrapped around him. Eventually he fell to the earth and landed in a tree, where upon he realised he’d been in the thunderstorm for approximately 40 minutes.
This horror story of Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin goes to show just how powerful thunderstorms are, and I suppose it’s this strength that makes some people petrified of them. In England one lady used to ring up the Met Office every time she heard there may be thunder in the forecast. She used to hide in the cupboard under the stairs until the forecaster at the Met Office assured her that the storms had passed.
As William Rankin can testify, the air within a thunderstorm cloud is continually moving, and this is what gives the clouds the shapes like cauliflowers. It’s the constant movement that also causes lightning, because the particles within the storm rub against each other and become electrically charged. It’s the same charge that builds up when you shuffle across a carpet then touch another person; the electric shock you feel is like a tiny lightning strike. If you turn the light off, sometimes you can even see the spark.
In a towering thunderstorm, the negative charges build up at the bottom of the cloud and the positive ones gather at the top of the cloud. As opposites attract, positive charges will also build up in the ground below the storm. The charges will concentrate around anything that sticks up: buildings, poles, trees or even people. Eventually the charges become so great that the electricity will discharge, and this is what a lightning strike is – electricity levelling itself out. This can either happen within the cloud or from the cloud to the ground, but only about 25 percent of lightning strikes are between the cloud and the ground.
Thunderstorm clouds, officially called cumulonimbus clouds, also can produce hail, and they’re the only clouds that can. In order to produce a hail stone, a droplet of water has to move high up into a cloud and freeze, then drop through the cloud, melting and bumping into as much water as possible. After melting and re-freezing many times, eventually the hail stone becomes so large that it falls to the ground. Strangely, the dry climate that we have in Doha ensures that hail isn’t so uncommon. Most of our rain comes from a thunderstorm cloud and if the rain doesn’t evaporate before it hits the ground, then there’s a good chance that the hail won’t have melted either.
Thunderstorms can also produce some rather impressive dust storms; sometimes you can see vast walls of dust swallow up cities. These are known as ‘haboobs’. The name comes from the Arabic word ‘habb’ meaning ‘wind’ or ‘to blow’. As they sweep over you, the temperature drops, the winds pick up and the visibility drops to nearly nothing. They pose a daunting sight, towering up to a thousand metres (over 3,000 ft) high and over a kilometre long. They can occur wherever the ground is dry enough, including the Sahara desert, the US states of Arizona and Texas, and even here in Qatar. I was once wakeboarding when one of these huge walls of dust headed towards me. I’ve never gotten out of the sea so fast in my life!
This is the time of year in Qatar when the chance of seeing a thunderstorm becomes remote and it’s often hot and settled for months on end. I regret missing the recent thunderstorms, but I’m already looking forward to the ones we’ll see next winter.


Related Story