Wall of snow: Lightning as snow squall hits wind turbines

We just had a strong snow squall pass over AccuWeather HQ in State College, Pa., but before it reached us, it let loose a handful of lightning strikes to our west, north of Tyrone, probably striking the wind turbines on the top of the mountain.

The image above shows two of those; you can see additional strikes in the loop here. I've superimposed the strikes on top of a satellite photo showing the turbine locations (ovals are grass cleared around them, snaky lines are the roads to them). A 150-foot-tall metal lightning rod is just too attractive to the storm -- the lightning can't resist.

Thundersnow was also reported on Tussey Mountain (see this video, sorry for the rotation), just to our south! The squall line came on pretty quickly... here is a GIF animation of one-minute increments from the AccuCam:

It was literally a wall of snow when it came into Lewistown, Pa., (photo by the sister of the guy who took the thundersnow video below):

Of course, our employees caught the squall as it came in. I took a video of the tail end of the event as did Frank Strait and Kevin Byrne (you can hear the police desperately trying to get people to slow down by setting off their siren in both Kevin's video and mine).