Photos: See LA’s night sky electrified by phenomenal lightning show

There were thousands of lightning strikes

Lightning dazzled Los Angeles overnight, with thousands of strikes recorded over Southern California.

“A jet streak raced through the area last night and set off a convective outburst with plenty of lightning,” reports the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

Weather Service meteorologist Kristen Stewart says that jet stream mixed with an atmospheric river and a low pressure system; they all “crunched together, making the atmosphere unstable.”

Climate scientist Daniel Swain called it the “most spectacular winter lightning display in recent memory.”

He reported on Twitter that there were thousands of strikes, and the Los Angeles Times spoke overnight with a Weather Service meteorologist who observed 1,489 pulses of lightning off the coast in one five-minute period. (A “pulse” is when the lightning is in a cloud, as opposed to a strike, when it hits the ground, says Stewart.)

It was another rare spectacle during an unusually wet winter that also brought a dusting of snow earlier this month to elevations as low as 700 feet.

From the Manhattan Beach Pier to the San Fernando Valley, awestruck residents documented the electrifying show.

“Twelve years in LA, and I’ve never seen a storm like this, where lightning is striking things left and right and causing car alarms to go off,” says resident Joshua Fanning, who captured photos of lightning bolts over apartment building rooftops in West LA.

Below are some of the best images:

Photo by Joshua Fanning

By Juan Castro

Source: Curbed LA – All – Jenna Chandler