Loud thunder rattled dozens of districts across Lima late on Wednesday night, startling thousands of residents and setting off a flood of posts and comments on social media.
Many people initially believed the booming sounds were fireworks, explosions, or even an earthquake, based on reactions circulating online. The confusion was understandable: thunder is a rare occurrence in Lima. The city’s climate is shaped by the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountain range, conditions that normally make it difficult for electrical storms to form over the capital.
The thunderclaps arrived during a winter already characterized by unusually high temperatures, heat waves, and shifts in wind and cloud patterns. No evidence has emerged so far, however, to directly link the rumbling to the current El Nino Costero phenomenon.
Factors cited for Lima’s atypical winter include anomalous warming of the sea along the central coast, the passage of a warm oceanic Kelvin wave, a weakening of the South Pacific Anticyclone, and the predominance of north winds.
On July 25, the Alexander Von Humboldt meteorological station, located in La Molina, recorded a maximum temperature of 29.4 degrees Celsius. That figure stands 10.1 degrees above the climatological average for July and set a new historical record for that month. Authorities have not confirmed, however, that these anomalies directly explain the thunder that caught Lima’s residents off guard.
