Does thunder and lightening happen with a hurricane?
A hurricane definitely has thunder and lightning. However, the lightning in most of the tropical cyclones are not nearly as frequent as thunderstorms that form away from the tropical cyclone environment. the lightning is most frequent in the thunderstorm areas of the outer spiral bands than towards the center. There is a exception to that which is that lightning can form and be nearly continuous in the eye wall in storms that reach the upper cat 4 and cat 5 strength. I remember reading a study done specifically on lightning in the eye wall. I believe the study used one of the high altitude hurricane research aircraft to study Hurricane Emily in 2005 and were surprised to find electrical fields as strong as a Midwest thunderstorm in the eye wall when it was near its maximum intensity. The study was over before Katrina and Rita but land based detection systems also noted unusually high lightning rates before those two made landfall as well.
