Sierra Thunderstorm Outlook

[GGC23]

My preference is to hike through the storms rather than setting up my tent. If you set your tent up, you end up also pulling everything out of your pack, which increases the chance that things like your sleeping bag or puffy are going to get wet. And then you're left with a wet tent at the end of the storm, which is particularly annoying if there's not enough daylight left after the storm passes to dry the tent before night time. Hiking through the storm keeps you warm and occupied, rather than bored in your tent. Sure, you'll get wet, but as long as you're not hiking in jeans and a cotton sweatshirt, your body heat will dry your clothing fast once the rain stops. Just make sure you have a waterproof rain liner in your pack.

The caveat is that, if I'm hiking toward an area that you should avoid in a storm (e.g. above treeline), I'll stop and wait out the storm.

[Gogd]

If hiking I normally just keep trucking, save for going over passes. If I want to hunker down, I carry a dining/rain fly during the Sierra monsoon season. I don't like being holed up in a cramped tent in daylight. Extremely rare anyone gets stuck by a bolt, regardless where they situate themselves, so just follow the basic safety advice and don't let your imagination ruin the experience.

Ed

[c9h13no3]

Back to the topic at hand (using Windy), since I'm getting out this weekend, figured I'd run through what I'm looking at:

Sunday is just generally less stormy, so I'm choosing to go out then.

Windy only has one weather model that predicts lightning (the European one), so when you click on the Thunderstorm layer, that's the forecast you see. If you swap to say, the ICON model, you'll only see rain (but you know, they kinda go together). It is a good idea to check a couple, since they sometimes say very different things.

If you want to check out a particular location, you can do a similar thing, comparing the various weather models. If they're all in agreement it will be stormy... it will probably be stormy.

GoddardForecastWindy.png (569.43 KiB) Viewed 98 times

Personally, I don't really know how to average all these models together, or which ones to pay attention to. The NOAA websites kind distills it down into an idiot proof package. So here's the hourly forecast for Mt Goddard from NOAA, which is just way easier for me to interpret as a non-nerd. Maybe AlpineMike would have more insight than this, but it works for a bumbling idiot like myself.

[SSSdave]

OP is already on his route now. For this electronic physics person, the safest location in Dusy Basin IMO during lightning activity would be near these center approximate coordinates:

Decimal Degrees 37.09728, -118.55412

Just plug that value directly into caltopo to see the general map location at displayed map center.

Then one can do the same with Google Earth Pro with better detail where I've placed red "C"s at possible locations to tent. This is a dry bedrock bench zone with whitebark pines between a shallow pond just north and a seep stream south. The key topography advantage is there is steep slope just east that would be much more likely to attract hanging low in the atmosphere positive ionized leaders. It is one of the most concave dry bedrock locations in the basin so. Any of the lake edge or green stream locations are likely low resistance connected to zone grounds.

Tersely, the tops of thunderclouds usually have high positive potentials due to wind updrafted hail and ice crystals stripping away electrons through friction that fall away as liquid rain leaving net positives above. As such clouds move above the Earth's surface, they cause negative ions to be drawn below on land. Such won't occur easily where land is resistive like dry soil or bedrock while wet areas are likely interconnected to larger areas with low resistance mobile electrons.

During storms, after surfaces have become wet, bedrock and soil areas may become wet picking up electrolytes and be able to conduct charges more readily but are still less conductive than always wet areas. If one is in a tent atop say a dry plastic ground sheet, even if lightning strikes nearby, it is likely at most only likely to conduct around a person through metal tent poles.

https://www.weather.gov/wrh/TextProduct ... =sfoafdhnx

Don't be a ignorant fool rambling about during storms especially about open higher areas thinking anywhere is just as likely to be struck.