question: Why does it seem like thunderstorms happen more frequently at night than during the day?
comment: Night storms are generally infrequent, since thunderstorm updrafts are generally stable after sunset. In certain places, thunderstorms that form during the day can persist through the night if they have a steady source of moist air at low level. This is due to an increase in poleward airflow caused by the de-coupling of the surface friction from the winds just above the boundary layer.
passages: Section::::Hazards.
  
  Each year, many people are killed or seriously injured by severe thunderstorms despite the advance warning. While severe thunderstorms are most common in the spring and summer, they can occur at just about any time of the year.
  
  Section::::Hazards.:Cloud-to-ground lightning.
   Late-night rains and early morning rains may simply be the last precipitation of a passing weather front. However, since fronts pass at night as often as they do in the day, morning rain is no predictor of a dry afternoon. However, this lore can describe non-frontal weather. Given sufficient surface heating, a late-day rainstorm may continue to develop into the night, produce early precipitation, then dissipate by late morning. This, though, is the exception rather than the rule. Only 40% of rain is produced by convective events – 60% is the result of a frontal passage.
  
  Section::::Further reading.
   The time period in the Plains where thunderstorm areas are most prevalent ranges between May and September. Mesoscale convective systems develop over the region during this time frame, with a bulk of the activity occurring between 6 and 9 p.m. local time. Mesoscale convective systems bring 30 to 70 percent of the annual warm season rainfall to the Plains. A subset of these systems known as mesoscale convective complexes lead to up to 10% of the annual rainfall across the Plains and Midwest. Squall lines account for 30% of the large thunderstorm complexes which move through the region.
   Nimbostratus, unlike cumulonimbus, is not associated with thunderstorms, however at an unusually unstable warm front caused as a result of the advancing warm air being hot, humid and unstable, cumulonimbus clouds may be embedded within the usual nimbostratus. Lightning from an embedded cumulonimbus cloud may interact with the nimbostratus but only in the immediate area around it. In this situation with lightning and rain occurring it would be hard to tell which type of cloud was producing the rain from the ground, however cumulonimbus tend to produce larger droplets and more intense downpours. The occurrence of cumulonimbus and nimbostratus together is uncommon, and usually only nimbostratus is found at a warm front.
   Thunderstorm season in the United States and Canada runs in the spring through summer. These storms can produce hail, strong winds and tornadoes, usually during the afternoon and evening.
  
  Section::::Holidays.
  
  Section::::Holidays.:School breaks.
   Lightning at a sufficient distance may be seen and not heard; there is data that a lightning storm can be seen at over 100 miles whereas the thunder travels about 20 miles. Anecdotally, there are many examples of people saying 'the storm was directly overhead or all-around and yet there was no thunder'. There is no coherent data available.
  
  Section::::Effects.:High-energy radiation.
   Section::::Forecasting.
  
  These clouds are common in the advance of a cold front or in unstable atmospheric conditions such as an area of low pressure. They can grow into larger Cumulus congestus which could bring rain, winds and in worse cases, thunder and lightning. If these clouds are present in the morning or early afternoon they show a significant instability in the atmosphere likely leading to storms later in the day.
  
  Section::::Formation.
   Section::::Motion.:Back-building thunderstorm.
   The latent heat release from condensation is the determinate between significant convection and almost no convection at all. The fact that air is generally cooler during winter months, and therefore cannot hold as much water vapor and associated latent heat, is why significant convection (thunderstorms) are infrequent in cooler areas during that period. Thundersnow is one situation where forcing mechanisms provide support for very steep environmental lapse rates, which as mentioned before is an archetype for favored convection. The small amount of latent heat released from air rising and condensing moisture in a thundersnow also serves to increase this convective potential, although minimally. There are also three types of thunderstorms: orographic, air mass, and frontal.
   Though the Tampa Bay area is sometimes referred to as the "Lightning Capital of the World", it is more accurately called the “Lightning Capital of North America” if measured by average number of days with thunderstorm activity per year. During the summer, west-central Florida receives as much lightning as the world's true lightning leaders such as the Lake Victoria region of Africa and the central Amazon River Basin. However, there are few thunderstorms in the Tampa Bay area from approximately October to May, decreasing the yearly average.
   In areas where trees or other vegetation are present, there is little to no rain that can prevent the lightning from causing them to catch fire. Storm winds also fan the fire and firestorm, causing it to spread more quickly.
   Intra-cloud lightning most commonly occurs between the upper anvil portion and lower reaches of a given thunderstorm. This lightning can sometimes be observed at great distances at night as so-called "sheet lightning". In such instances, the observer may see only a flash of light without hearing any thunder.
   BULLET::::- Storm location: Even in daylight, “storm chasers” can use directional optical detectors that can be pointed at an individual cloud to distinguish thunderclouds at a distance. This is particularly important for identifying the strongest thunderstorms which produce tornadoes, since such storms produce higher flash rates with more high frequency radiation than weaker non-tornadic storms.
   This occurs from both the mixture of warmer and colder air masses, as well as differences in moisture concentrations, and it generally happens at the boundaries between them. The flow of warm ocean currents past drier land masses, such as the Gulf Stream, partially explains the elevated frequency of lightning in the Southeast United States. Because the influence of small or absent land masses in the vast stretches of the world's oceans limits the differences between these variants in the atmosphere, lightning is notably less frequent there than over larger landforms. The North and South Poles are limited in their coverage of thunderstorms and therefore result in areas with the least amount of lightning.
   Dry thunderstorms occur essentially in dry conditions, and their lightning is a major cause of wildfires. Because of that, the National Weather Service, and other agencies around the world, issue forecasts for its likelihood over large areas.
  
  Section::::Where dry thunderstorms occur.
   In more contemporary times, thunderstorms have taken on the role of a scientific curiosity. Every spring, storm chasers head to the Great Plains of the United States and the Canadian Prairies to explore the scientific aspects of storms and tornadoes through use of videotaping. Radio pulses produced by cosmic rays are being used to study how electric charges develop within thunderstorms. More organized meteorological projects such as VORTEX2 use an array of sensors, such as the Doppler on Wheels, vehicles with mounted automated weather stations, weather balloons, and unmanned aircraft to investigate thunderstorms expected to produce severe weather. Lightning is detected remotely using sensors that detect cloud-to-ground lightning strokes with 95 percent accuracy in detection and within of their point of origin.
   "N. pronotalis" is common on the hottest of summer evenings and afternoons ("dog days"). It is active from as early as 7 a.m. to as late as 10 p.m., with peak activity from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. In most of their range "N. pronotalis" can be heard from July to October, with peak activity in August.
   Spring in Chicago is perhaps the city's most unpredictable season: Winter can last until April or even May, with the 1953-54 winter in Chicago lasting from November until May. Thunderstorms can occur any time of the year, but are most prevalent in the springtime as the city's lakeside location makes it a center of conflicts between large volumes of warm and cold air, which can trigger a wide variety of severe weather. The most severe storms can contain large hail, damaging straight-line winds, flooding, and tornadoes. Since 1850, 17 tornadoes have struck the Chicago city limits. During thunderstorms lightning strikes are seen to frequently hit Chicago's skyscrapers.
   BULLET::::- A ground-based lightning network must be able to detect a flash with at least three antennas to locate it with an acceptable margin of error. This often leads to the rejection of cloud-to-cloud lightning, as one antenna might detect the position of the flash on the starting cloud and the other antenna the receiving one. As a result, ground-based networks have a tendency to underestimate the number of flashes, especially at the beginning of storms where cloud-to-cloud lightning is prevalent.
   Tornado occurrence is highly dependent on the time of day, because of solar heating. Worldwide, most tornadoes occur in the late afternoon, between 3 pm and 7 pm local time, with a peak near 5 pm. Destructive tornadoes can occur at any time of day, as evidenced by the Gainesville Tornado of 1936 (one of the deadliest tornadoes in history) that occurred at 8:30 am local time.
  
  Section::::Geography.
   "Blows its horn" refers to thunderstorms. While March thunderstorms indicate that the weather is unusually warm for that time of year (thunderstorms can occur only with a sufficiently large temperature difference between ground and sky and sufficient amounts of moisture to produce charge differential within a cloud).
  
  Section::::Calendrical lore.:July.
   Section::::Life cycle.
   The cloud must develop to a certain vertical extent before lightning is produced, so generally weather radar will indicate a developing storm before a lightning detector does. It is not always clear from early returns if a shower cloud will develop into a thunderstorm, and weather radar also sometimes suffers from a "masking" effect by attenuation, where precipitation close to the radar can hide (perhaps more intense) precipitation farther away. Lightning detectors do not suffer from a masking effect and can provide confirmation when a shower cloud has evolved into a thunderstorm.
   "A. coronatus" foraging is continuous at night, but diurnal foraging only occurs after recent rain. Following a heavy rain, diurnal foraging commences, followed by a gradual cessation over a period of a day or two. Periodic rains during the dry season initiate a short bout of diurnal foraging, but when the rains became more continuous, diurnal foraging becomes continuous. Thus, the lack of diurnal foraging during the dry season is a short-term response to immediate environmental conditions and not a long-term change in colony foraging behavior.
   On August 6, some of Guillermo's moisture was brought to Northern California and the San Francisco Bay Area by the jet stream, bringing rare dry lightning storms to those areas during the night.
  
  Section::::Systems.:Hurricane Hilda.
  
presuppositions: Storms are more common at night than in the day.
corrections: The time of the day does not effect or play a specific role in creating a thunderstorm.
raw_presuppositions: Storms are more common at night than in the day. Storms are more common at night than in the day.
raw_corrections: The time of the day does not effect or play a specific role in creating a thunderstorm. Storms are uncommon at night but can linger into the night from the day.