Very Strange Winter Storm in Midwest Had Incredible Lightning Sunday.

For some reason, over the past couple of years, a surprising number of winter storms in the United States have spat out lightning and "thunder snow"

James Menzies of @UKStormChaser on Twitter captured

these incredible cloud to ground lightning bolts amid

sleet and snow Sunday near Norman, Oklahoma.  

The one crossing the nation now really takes the cake. Huge swaths of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and other areas had a lot of thunder and lightning as heavy sleet fell.

Sleet was the predominant precipitation in that area, though some thunderstorms also had freezing rain or snow.

Usually, thunder in winter storms comes from so called "elevated" thunderstorms.  The cold air near the earth's surface has undercut the warm air thunderstorms usually thrive on.

So the thunderstorms develop a little higher up in the atmosphere than they normally do, up in the warm air that's on top of the thin layer of chill near the ground. In these cases,  most of the lightning is up high, crackling between the clouds. Some strikes hit the ground, but not many.

This winter weather system had a number of storms with lots of lightning strikes hitting the ground. Some were actually quite severe, and you had the spectacle of hail the size of quarters mixing with the deluge of sleet pellets beneath the thunderstorm.

A strange weather event indeed.

Here's what it looked like on the ground:  Quarter sized hail causing damage amid just a torrential downpour of sleet in the midst of the storm, which also brought lightning and thunder to this area.