I'm not talking about the ISS. I'm talking about larger stations such as Bernal Spheres, O'Neil Cylinders, Stanford Tori, good old-fashioned hollowed-out asteroids, and so on.
We have a sci-fi game and one of our narrative designers has a mission idea that requires a storm inside the station. I'm decent at checking their science, but I know nothing about meteorology and this seems pretty unlikely. That being said, I've not the foggiest clue.
You can get a micro-climate in your space station caused by temperature differentials and convection. But the orders of energy and energy differentials needed to produce a proper storm are immense. The energy differentials in your space stations are by far not enough to induce a naturally occurring draft sufficient to be called a storm, unless yours is hundreds of kilometers wide and has sufficient open space to allow atmospheric convection to occur, but these kinds of circumstances are generally undesired in a controlled environment like space stations.
The only real way to achieve high winds would be artificially, say, the air system is going completely haywire. Or there is a hull breach so air is sucked out at high velocity. Or your space station could even have a wind tunnel of all things (though only god knows why that would be there...)
In every other situation the best you could hope for are some drafts due thermally induced convection or pressurization working better/worse at some parts of your station thus causing pressure differentials.
I hope this helps you.
Thunderstorm Under the "energy" section you can see how much energy a single thunderstorm takes.
Energy levels and comparison of different events Here are several events, from a very small scale to a cosmic scale listed. If you have that much rogue energy floating around in your space station that something like this could occur, something has gone wrong.
To sustain a storm for the length of your mission, you need external inputs of energy. You could use a Solar storm.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/geomagnetic-storms
During storms, the currents in the ionosphere, as well as the energetic particles that precipitate into the ionosphere add energy in the form of heat that can increase the density and distribution of density in the upper atmosphere, causing extra drag on satellites in low-earth orbit.
What would a solar storm hitting your large station entail? Here is what I can think of.
Aurorae. That happens on earth and might happen in your station as well. It would look cool and if this is a video game, offers to possibility of sweet light effects.
Charged particles. This is the reason for the aurora but if they get to the ground they could mess things up. This is part of how solar storms mess up electronics on earth. In your game you could have the lights go out and computers be unreliable.
So far this storm has wild color effects, the lights go out and you might get hit by lightning. It would be quiet. Which could be cool for a game because it would be eerie.
The Stanford Torus design is too small in volume to generate real weather; the tube that actually has atmosphere is only a kilometer or two across. Bernal Spheres especially with their 8 kilometer radius and the larger, Type 3, O'Neil Cylinders (4km radius) are a different story; they're built on a scale that actually supports atmospheric differentiation. They have the potential to generate Earthlike weather systems where there are sufficient, and sufficiently differentiated, thermal inputs.
Type 3 O'Neil Cylinders with their window strip/land strip design and rotational gravity are a good case for real stormy weather. Their land surfaces will heat up and create convection systems of air and water vapour which have the potential to cause thunderstorms.
Bernal Spheres would appear to show more of a case for a cyclic fog-cloud-rain-repeat weather pattern, either time or location based depending on the exact parameters being used in the design, due to the polar heating and lighting set up.
Even the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA Kennedy Space Center is large enough to have weather, and it's considerably smaller than all but the smallest space stations -- maybe twice the length and breadth of the ISS, though much deeper.
In Sir Arthur C. Clarke's classic science fiction book Rendezvous with Rama, Clarke posited a mammoth long-orbit station/probe/biosphere which is a 20 kilometer diameter, 54 kilometer long cylinder.
The inner cylindrical surface is the living space, and at the rearmost axial endpoint there are strange immense projections, around which immense electrical displays occur when the device is using drive power (the implication is that these are byproducts or residual energies) and these have the secondary impact of creating weather - storms, inclement weather etc.
Though the alien and exotic drive system part of his story is perforce far-fetched, the concept of designing your drive or energy conversion systems to secondarily help generate ionic change in your interior atmosphere in order to drive artificial weather events and patterns make a lot of sense - assuming some of your surface area is devoted to agriculture versus all horti / agri - culture being hydroponic.
Weather is fundamentally the movement of air caused by temperature differentials in the atmosphere. In other words - some air is hotter than other air, and this causes the air to move around trying to find an equilibrium. All other weather effects are side effects of the big movements, mostly caused by things (namely water vapor) that the air has picked up while moving around.
Strong weather requires large temperature differentials, which in turn requires large amounts of air. There is no theoretical limit to the amount of air we can put in a space station - we just need enough materials to surround it and enough air to fill it. Water vapor is also easy to come by.
You also need temperature variance. That's easy enough to find - any station near a star is going to have one side that is naturally warmer than the other. Other temperature variations on Earth come from the materials of Earth's surface and the different ways that they retain heat (which is also incidentally affected by the presence or absence of water and water vapor). We can add different materials to our space station as well, and control where we put the water.
You don't even need that much volume to generate small amounts of weather. The Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building has 3,665,000 cubic meters and it can generate clouds on humid days. Not exactly a thunderstorm, but enough to cause significant damage to the planes being constructed there if their air conditioning ever breaks.
The problem is that extreme weather isn't very good for space stations. As anyone currently living in the Florida Panhandle or the Carolinas can tell you, extreme weather tends to have a negative effect on quality of life. So most space stations are going to go out of their way to avoid anything more powerful than a spring shower. And if you have the technology to build a can full of sky, you have the technology to control it.
An air conditioning system around the outside of your station can distribute the heat from the sun to keep the temperature nice and even. Baffles (like the one pictured above) can break up the movement of large quantities of air and prevent hurricanes from gathering momentum. When you get right down to it, a space station isn't all that different from a building built to a larger scale, and that just means you need a larger air conditioning unit.
Both images taken from Schlock Mercenary, a lovely space opera web comic. Book 14 (Broken Wind) is about our intrepid team of mercenaries discovering a station built by a race of aliens who had entirely too much time on their hands.
