【Caged Women】

For fans of snowstorms,Caged Women thundersnow is the holy grail of winter weather phenomena. And Thursday's blizzard that struck areas from Philadelphia to southern Maine has featured this relatively rare phenomena in unusual abundance.

Numerous lightning strikes were detected in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and in other states as intense snow bands with characteristics of thunderstorms -- think of them as winter's version of summertime downpours -- rotated through.

SEE ALSO: Ferocious blizzard smacks New York, but it'll be over sooner than you think

On Twitter, #thundersnow has been a trending hashtag, with users sharing videos showing heavy snow accompanied by the long rumbling bass sounds of thunder in the wintertime.

The ingredients for thundersnow are different compared to what cooks up a more common summertime storm. For example, summer storms typically form on warm, humid days, and snowstorms obviously lack such heating at ground level.

But what they lack in heat they make up for in lift, specifically narrow layers of rapidly rising air. Such lifting is typically triggered by dynamics associated with rapidly intensifying storm systems like the one that "bombed out" south of Long Island on Thursday. It's this strong lifting, usually in a narrow layer of air below 25,000 feet, that generates thundersnow.

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Snowstorms tend to have flat, layered clouds, with most of the precipitation formed in the so-called snow growth layer at relatively low levels of the atmosphere.

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For thundersnow to occur, the right ingredients need to come together to lift some of these flatter clouds and mold them into protrusions that some meteorologists call turrets.

Such turrets protrude like a fist above the the broad and flat layers of snow-producing clouds, driven to greater heights by lifting from approaching weather features. These weather systems may be a deep dip in the mid-level jet stream, known as a trough, that causes air to rise ahead of it, or ascent from the formation of frontal zones within storm systems, known by the fancy term "frontogenesis."

Lightning centered on Connecticut = thundersnow from rapidly intensifying storm.
Last 6 hours of strikes: pic.twitter.com/xqMqQ7qqLA

— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) February 9, 2017

Just some maps of rapidly intensifying snow storm ... excitement of blizzards & thundersnow may inspire a kid to be an atmospheric scientist pic.twitter.com/vPjugEPyIG

— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) February 9, 2017

When the right conditions are present, these turrets can form what's known as elevated convection (elevated because the cloud is not based near the Earth's surface). Within these clouds, large snowflakes mix with icy pellets known as graupel, and electrical charges can build up from static electricity as these particles collide in the turbulent atmosphere. This static electricity buildup eventually can trigger occasional cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-ground lightning strikes.

Areas of thundersnow are typically associated with extremely heavy snowfall rates because the extra lift in such snowbands enhances the production of snowflakes. So, for weather enthusiasts, they have the dual benefit of having lightning and thunder and also leading to a higher snow total. That's a win-win-win.

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I was asked this morning if thunder snow is as dangerous as summer-time thunder. Yup...here's the proof. https://t.co/HLMw1lAY5a

— TJ Del Santo ⚡ (@tjdelsanto) February 9, 2017

Interestingly, because thundersnow occurs as a result of elevated convection, the thunder typically sounds different than the rumbles from an average summertime thunderstorm. Thundersnow tends to be somewhat muffled, influenced by its altitude, the cold air the sound waves are traveling through and the snow on the ground.

If you were flying through thundersnow, it forms in the type of cloud that would jolt you to the seat and then let you go like a roller coaster once you reach the edge of it.

All of this combines to make thundersnow a truly special and rare weather event.

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