This one is one of the most popular misconceptions that I have heard growing up, and it is that people associate a heavy rain event with being a monsoon. Yes, a monsoon is the cause of an intense rainy season and can bring a lot of rain, but it also leads to a dry season as well. Simply put, a monsoon is a seasonal reversal of the wind pattern that is accompanied by changes in precipitation and winds.
Essentially, a monsoon is caused by the difference in heating of land and water surfaces at different times of the year because each surface absorbs heat differently. The water absorbs a lot more heat in order for it to change temperature, whereas the land takes less heat to change the temperature. Therefore, during the warm months, the land heats up quicker than the sea causing the atmospheric gases to expand there providing lower pressure over land and higher pressure over the water. This then results in moist air flowing from the sea to the land, called a sea breeze, and the air then rises and condenses to bring large amounts of precipitation in the 'rainy season'.
The opposite occurs in the colder months when the lands cools faster than the sea. Here, low pressure occurs over the water due to it being warmer, and air flows from the high pressure over land to the sea, called a land breeze. Dry conditions then occur over land and precipitation falls over the water, which is why it is called the 'dry season' on land.
This process is what is seen along the New Jersey shore but to a smaller and less intense scale.
Lightning
Contrary to what is commonly believed, lightning can in fact strike the same place more than once and also does not always strike the ground
First, lightning is an electrical discharge when there is a buildup of opposite electrical charges, and lightning is what occurs as the process that tries to make the electrical distribution equal. To get onto the misconception, lightning can strike the same place, or human for that matter, more than once. That is because electrical charges do not have a memory and can not know where a lightning strike has occurred before.
Furthermore, lightning does necessarily have to strike the ground. Differences in electrical charge can form within a cloud, between two different clouds, between a cloud and the air, or between the cloud and the surface. Therefore, you can have four different types of lightning: intra-cloud(within a cloud), cloud-to-cloud lightning, cloud-to-air lightning, and cloud-to-ground lightning.
Finally, the method to tell how far away a storm is from you is called the 'flash bang method'. Count the number of seconds between the lightning flash and thunder, then divide by five, and that is how many miles the storm is from your location.
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