First Summer Thunderstorm

Photo by Stephen Crane on Unsplash

Just about 3:15 today the sky grew dark, torrents of rain began to fall, and as forecasted (although arriving a little bit earlier in the day) came our first thundershower of the summer. We’re not talking about an occasional clap of thunder here or there. Still, to keep things in perspective, our coastal location and geography mean that the storms often lose intensity when they reach the shore of Deer Isle. And they tend to break up quickly — by 3:30 the rain had eased back to a shower, and the crash of the sky drums subsided. We got a couple of stray rain bursts and rumbles over the next hour, but nothing compared to the original.

During today’s storm the flash of the lightning was muted because of the daylight behind the clouds. And honestly, this one was nothing like those with the big, pitch-black thunderheads we would see roll across the sky each afternoon at about 4 pm when we lived in Syracuse. You thought the lightning was going to strike the big maple looming over the roof, or the house itself. They were crazy strong!

My mother taught us at a young age that you could estimate the distance of a thunderstorm by noting the passage of time between the flash of lighting and the peal of thunder. For some reason, as a kid, I thought it was one mile for each second I counted, but weather sites tell me to divide the number of seconds by five. This is because the speed of light is (for all intent and purpose) instantaneous, while in a Maine summer the speed of sound in air is approximately 1,125 feet per second, which is equivalent to about 767 miles per hour. So it takes 4.7 seconds for the sound of thunder to travel a mile.

Here on Deer Isle, there aren’t a lot of reported lightning strikes. But the winds that can whip up in a good storm frequently blow trees over and snag power lines onto the island. Most of my neighbors have invested in standby generators — the kind that kick on automatically when the power fails and run on propane. But some still rely on the small gasoline generators with pull cranks that will just about keep your refrigerator and freezer running until the Versant crews can restore power.

Almanac

Today’s Forecast: Rainy conditions from 12PM-6PM, with thunderstorm expected at 6PM.

Weather
Low Temperature: 60	High Temperature: 64	.35
Wind Direction: SW	Max Wind (mph): 19
Sunrise: 5:11	Sunset: 8:11
Lunar Phase: Waning Crescent	Days to Next Full: 20

References

• 2025-07-20

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