Surprisingly very little can be found about lightning and thunder during snow storms. Growing up, the great lightning storms of the flat plains were amazingly bright and beautiful (and frightening), but the photographers knew that they would only get the best shots during the peak April-August season. Not really the time of year for snow.

Right now, as a foot piles up in Boston, we are having a lightning blizzard. Poor cars that are stuck with spinning tires on Dartmouth Street. It’s a slight incline and it’s a major street. I hear the spinning tires outside my window about once every 15 minutes along with the crashes of thunder every half hour (which I first thought were snowmovers crashing the asphalt).

From sky-fire.tv:
Can there be lightning during a snowstorm?
Lightning is usually associated with thunderstorms, and therefore is thought to be a spring and summer event. Yet lightning does occur during winter, and even during heavy snowfalls and blizzards. Winter lightning appears to be unusually powerful, associated with loud and long thunderclaps. Sometimes associated snowfalls can reach 3 inches an hour. A man was struck by lightning during a blizzard in Minneapolis during March of 1996. He is still alive…and very puzzled.

From a meterologist from the National Weather Service:
I don’t believe there is any scientific name for lightning and thunder
during a snowstorm. That does happen occasionally in the wintertime, and
those events usually produce brief bursts of very heavy snow. These storms
are usually caused by a strong surge of warm moist air flowing over a dome
of cold air at the surface. Thunderstorms may develop, but temperatures are
such that the precipitation remains all snow as it falls to the ground.