It seems like there's been a huge storm with lots of thunder and lightning every night for some weeks now (or maybe it just feels that way). Is this normal for Switzerland/Zurich at this time of the year? It is something we don't see much of in England.

well, for one it is due to global warming. weather changes these days happen in all parts of the globe like heatwave and too much rain and switzerland is not an exception.

My first summer in Switzerland 10 years ago was just like this. Lots of great storms to watch. The best one was one evening sitting out on our balcony watching 3 different storms converge into a massive one, that was one spectacular light show.

Been here (Swiss Romande) 18 years and we are having far more storms than we used to.
Did you see the flooding in the UK this week ?
Climate change ????

But aren`t the storms great! I remember 20 years ago going to Bastille day in Evian and returning on the boat to Ouchy, Lausanne to be met by torrential rain. It was a real " Singing in the Rain " moment with a bunch of British nurses in summer dresses , soaked to the skin, dancing and singing like crazy folk at the pier. To be picked up by some guy in a pink Cadillac giiving us a lift home!
Jo

Actually... Some of you must know Facebook? Here is my current (well it was, now I'll delete it) away message: "Sean is coming to the conclusion that the Swiss are not used to severe thunderstorms -- welcome to global warming, so get used to it." I'm sorry, but in the US we have thunderstorms like that -- and I'm not from the Midwest!

Swiss summers are usually hot and humid and the mountains trigger thunder storms which often move into the lowlands. I'd say this year is quite normal so far as storms go, except they are more often in July/August. Certainly you can expect far more thunder storms than in the UK.

What was not normal was the mildnest of last winter...

I think the fact we had a few one after the other over the last few days shortens the memory - we had some crackers last year, just spaced a bit more apart.

Global warming? Where's the evidence. Average temperatures in some areas in the late 1800's were higher than now. It's a load of stuff and nonsense.

Just repeating what Blick says *shrugs*.

These two links have radar images where you can see where the storms are:


http://www.meteonews.ch/index.php?se...er_rad&lang=en

http://www.meteoswiss.admin.ch/web/e...ar_images.html

I wonder why hasn't that particular someone reply to this post yet?

I look so much forward to his thesis like reply.

I think late 90s early 2000s we had some great storms and a lot of damage to cars with the hail storms.

DC

Here is the Meteoschweiz report on the storms. It is only in German, Italian or French -- no English.

We had a mini heatwave in March and now we're ligting the fire for the evening and preparing for another storm. The UK has really bad flooding this week and my sis just sent this of a Twister in Norfolk today.

I believe I heard some time somewhere that the UK is actually the world's "capital" for tornados, with more per square mile than anywhere else in the world.

This seems to be happening all over northern europe. On sunday I drove from london through the tunnel, through france, belgium - and it it just rained through out.

I've talked about the CO2 = Global warming nonsense elsewhere, but the climate IS changing. This is a short page about solar storms:

In 2005 we had a very severe hail storm between Montreux and Lavaux. It happened very suddenly on a hot afternoon in July when the temperature dropped very quickly from 27 to 15 degrees. The picture was taken 2 hours after when the temperature had returned to 25 so you can imagine the hail stones were a lot larger when they landed. Many thousands of properties and cars were damaged and there was severe losses in the vineyards. The second pic is one of our garden chairs - glad I wasn't sitting on it !

I was sent some superb pictures of the storm over Geneva taken from the Saleve, lightning strikes galore I tell ya!

We get a lot of storms with lightning usually in July and August but this year they started very early.