Comment 2 for bug 895046

For the record, I just tried this myself and can confirm that, yes, this IS possible with map triggers, custom animations, a custom artmd.ini, and a small amount of time and coding.

Even random lightning strikes can be mimicked (although not perfectly) to look like an ion storm.

However, this is a question of how much time it would take to code this feature versus how much time it would save in total for modders, and more importantly, how many people would use it.