Rumbling rolls of thunder and spectacular lightning strikes lit the night skies as a rare September storm brought scant rainfall to Santa Barbara County as Tuesday passed into Wednesday. More than 2,000 lightning strikes were counted out in the Pacific and 272 bolts hit the ground in the county, said Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service (NWS) in Oxnard.
“A lot of dryish air near the ground minimized some of the rain,” Kittell explained of the series of small storms that passed overhead. “Some of them were clusters of thunderstorms, each individual one moving fairly fast, which means limited rainfall amounts.” The totals ranged from one-tenth of an inch to a high of 0.63 inches in Buellton.
The early storm may or may not indicate a wet winter, which the NWS’s Climate Prediction Center clocks as La Niña, typically on the dry side, but not always. “It feels like a Las Vegas odds maker would lean toward the dry side,” Kittell said, adding that it was hard to predict now what may happen next January.
Though some wind-related damage was reported in Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties from some heavy downdrafts, first responder agencies in Santa Barbara County so far reported no damage.
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