11,000 lighting strikes in Michigan? Normal?

Hello ATS, about a week ago there was a tornado in Dexter, Michigan, which is about 45 minutes to an hour outside of Detroit. Luckily due to their warning systems no one was hurt. The tornado damaged roughly 100 (if i'm recalling correctly, most of this info is from local news weather source) and was a class F3 to F5 (again didn't get the full story from the news). Tornadoes in michigan are somewhat of a rare occurrence but they do happen. What struck me as odd is that they said there were 11,000 lightning strikes. Is this normal with tornadoes? Is this even the correct number or is it grossly overestimated? Just looking for some answers here...

Thanks ATS

reply to post by Bigfoot12714


We had a strong EF-3 tornado. At last toll today 150 homes hit, 75 to be demolished. One aspect of it that was interesting to me is that we were in the middle of this thing. Our tornado warning started at 4:45 pm and ended at 7:25 pm. That's how long this storm was in Washtenaw county.

Because I was supposed to do my show at 7 pm and with all the power fluctuations I was watching the radar closely. The storm stayed in the county here for that entire time. We had pea, golf ball and in between hail several times. The entire time lightning was striking several times a minute. So that 11k figure seems like a good number given the time it was here and the number of storms in the state that night.

Got almost an hour of HD video out of it - the only plus that I could find in the event.

Thanks for the info i appreciate it. i live in wayne county and we got a small amount of rain. apparently the storm split up around us. The question that has been bugging me is, is that a lot of lightning for a storm like that or is that normal

reply to post by Bigfoot12714


Not sure but wiki says....

On average, lightning strikes the earth about 100 times every second.
Wikipedia

That's 6000 times a minute.

but in a concentrated area, to have 11,000 lightning strikes is probably not normal

shouldn't the issue be not only lightining but tornados in michigan during mid march? and also the 75 degree weather?

Sounds very normal. I remember last summer we had some thunderstorms in denmark and the day after we could read that there were over 10.000 lightning strikes in one storm. And Denmark is very small One storm is big enough to cover denmark and half of sweden before it's over..