Saturday, June 13, 2009

Wall of Storms

Sounds like it must be a wizard spell. Like Wall of Fire except with lightning damage. But I'm talking about some weather we had here recently. Given my previous posts with pictures of snow, rainbows, fluffy clouds, and fire rainbows, it may have become apparent that I am fascinated by the weather. Well, lately we've been getting a lot of thunderstorms. Sadly, I haven't taken any pictures of pretty lightning strikes, but I do have a cool picture of approaching storm clouds. First, here's what the radar map looked like (Photoshopped in an attempt to hide my not-so-secret location):


Yes, that is a swiftly approaching wall of storms. After seeing that on weather.com, I picked up my camera and headed outside. It was a balmy 85 degrees F (29 C). Here's what the cloud looked like as it approached:


This shot was taken a minute later; you can't see the dramatic edge so much, but you can see the interesting cloud structure a little better:


This is when the wind started picking up, and before ten minutes had passed, it had dropped by about 15 degrees F (8 degrees C). Okay, I don't really know how much it dropped in how long, but that's my best estimate. Hot and humid to breezy and cool in mere minutes. I took a few pictures when it started pouring (with high winds and thunder and lightning), but they don't look particularly interesting--just kind of wet.

Summer lightning storms are so much fun... as long as I'm safe inside (or on the porch taking photos).

2 comments:

Sebastian Anthony said...

Oooh, pretty... you... weather geek.

I'm sure we have similar occurrences here; I ought to look out for them! Actually, I've probably photographed lots of such phenomena and just not realised it...

Or we just don't get proper storm fronts here in the UK, which is entirely possible -- what with us not being continental and all.

Eleni said...

I am so many kinds of geek, I might as well add "weather geek" to the list. Meteorology has links to oceanography, after all.

I think usually our storms are more patchy. It's pretty uncommon to get such a nice clean front.