cknobs

this may seem like a stupid question but when they say rain in Kauai do they mean thunder and lightning. Do you need to be careful of gettign stuck somewhere with a lightning storm?

sistahlou

I don't think they have different rain from the mainland or anywhere else in the world. It rains, it pours, it drizzles and sometimes it's torrential. Occasionally, just like in my own backyard there's thunder and lightning, no more no less. I think...

makai1

nah... just think

aloha

This question caught my interest because I have a relative who lived in HI for aboout 15 years. As he is from the midwest, where we have quite a bit of lightning, he said he actually missed lightning storms because they almost never occurred in HI.

Just now I did a little googling, and found several references to the relatively low amount of lightning there. One interesting thing I found was a 15 page climate summary of HI by the Natl Weather Svc ( a pdf document that can be accesssed at www.weather.gov/climate/local_data.php?wfo=hnl ) It says "Intense local storms are sometimes accompanied by lightning and thunder. These thunderstorms also occasionally accompany very intense rainfall along a cold front moving across the islands. In the lowlands, thunderstorms occur an average of only five to 10 times a year. Thunderstorms are reported somewhere in the State about 20 to 30 days a year, and more often in winter than in summer."

lcuy

I love thunder and lightning storms, but we rarely have them in Hawaii. As stated above, they are very wimpy compared to storms on the mainland.
I read somewhere that it has to do with the ocean and the temperature and wind currents, but I can't remember the details.

I'd guess I see maybe 3 or 4 a year and usually only for only 10 minutes or so, and mostly at night.

Same rules here as anywhere else...get out of the water, off the golf course, and away from tall trees.

Now rain is another story...Where I live in Honolulu, we get a short intense storm nearly every night, and enough drizzle (liquid sunshine)to make a rainbow many days of the week. In the winter, we can sometimes get several days of solid rain and it gets cold- 60 at night- so we light a fire in our fireplace.....

Most of the time (even while it is raining)it is sunny and breezy, but the rain that falls is enough that we've had to water our lush lawn only about 10 times in 20 years!

OO

I am so impressed! Every person in this thread has spelled lightning correctly. Do you know how rare that is?!

There is lightning, and there is lightening, and they are not the same animal, so I found when I used the wrong one describing a storm. My Mom got a good laugh out of that--you see, my Dad was a research engineer for GE in the lightning arrester division. His PhD thesis was on lightning blah blah, yet his own daughter couldn't spell the word. LOL Can now though, and it pops out at me when it's spelled correctly. More often than not, it's not. Very impressive people here on Fodors. OK--pardon the little aside. Carry on.

karameli

We were in Hawaii for 10 days in the middle of August and didn't see a single bolt of lightning. A few drizzly hours, but no storms. Have fun!

Kal

Had a major lightning storm one night last Dec/Jan. Lit up the entire room and grounds.

First big one we've experienced since we started our exhaustive research on Kauai.

Some big, dumb idiot even went out in it to try and get pics of the lit up sky and the trees silhouettes. :-"

They can't hold a candle to the MidWestern storms as mentioned.