Lightning storm prediction?

[Racum]

Is there a way to predict lightning storms? ...or are they random within heavy rain hours?

[Starwort]

I believe lightning is simply part of 'Heavy Rain' (but I'm sure treeki would be happy to correct me if I'm wrong lol)

[Treeki]

I’m fairly sure it’s pseudorandom as with the other timed weather phenomena (and probably restricted to Heavy Rain, but I haven’t fully confirmed), but I need to do more testing to verify its in-game behaviour before I have solid data I can put into MeteoNook for it.

[JKDos]

I opened a suggestion for this before seeing there was a topic for it already.

They seem to most definitely be pseudorandom as TTing backwards to a point in history you had a thunderstorm works. I haven't tested enough to say whether or not they can only occur with heavy rain, but I know that they aren't guaranteed with heavy rain.

It's sad this isn't a thing yet. Lightning storms seem to be a phenomenon just like Arora Borealis or special clouds. With the ability to track thunderstorms, this would help some people find their seeds faster. Because while 100 people may have rain on March-20th, 10 people may have thunderstorms. I've already found my seed, but I derive great enjoyment IRL from being in a thunderstorm, and I can experience the same effect to some degree in video games. Being able to TT or look forward to them would be way cooler than meteor showers which I mostly always ignore.

[Meatbag123]

You know, I also kind of enjoy thunderstorms. Whenever there's a thunderstorm on my island, I turn this TV camera I got around when I started playing acnh from a friend on, and pretend the thunderstorm is so bad it needs a TV warning on the news, and I'm getting the footage for the warning, so for me, it's unfortunate that It's just something that probably just randomly appears in heavy rain. I think they're not limited to heavy rain, though, because I've seen a little bit of lightning at the start of a hour that has normal rain, though it goes away quite quickly. I've only ever seen around 2 thunderstorms for my entire 700+ hour playthrough of the game, which is pretty unfortunate. At least as far as I'm aware.