There was a great thunderstorm here last night. Mostly sheet lightning off in the distance, but occasionally there were cloud-to-cloud bolts directly overhead that, rather than just flashing for an instant, seemed to propagate across the sky over a period of up to a second or so. I wish I could describe it better, because that was some of the coolest weather I’ve ever seen. Here’s a screenshot of a radar shot at the time of the storm, to give you an idea of the magnitude of it.
Last week we had a storm with lightning so frequent that it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that there wasn’t more than a two or three second gap between flashes for the whole half hour I watched it. Again, mostly sheet lightning, but still cool.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, we don’t have the towering thunderstorms that are so frequent in the mid-west.
I remember driving west on I-90, in South Dakota, blue sky overhead, and in front of me. I glanced in the rear-view mirror, where the sky was Black not off-white, not dark gray, but black. That sky had been blue just minutes before.
I watched it gain and over take me as I was going 85MPH (it was when SD had no speed limit) It overtook me in a matter of minutes.
Mid-day to black night full of sound and water, punctuated with strobe flashes just seconds apart.
I had to pull over and hope I wasn’t the tallest thing around.
Ten minutes later, I was in full sun again.
wow.
Thunderstorms are neat, but they are not the neatest.
The neatest is to awaken with no alarm clock. You lie in bed and enjoy its warm contrast to the cold warm. They you know why you are wake. It happened and the silence woke you.
You put your feet on the cold floor and look out the window to see a perfect field of snow in your front yard. That is the neatest.
Alberta, too. I’m in Edmonton, and we had a spectacular thunderstorm Wednesday morning about 4. Woke everyone up with the strobe-like lighnting, and the house shaking thunder. Too cool!
I enjoy night storms, but a good day storm can be cool, too. Earlier this week we had a front of heavy storms roll in. I was walking between buildings at work and saw the northwest sky was pretty dark. A few minutes later what had been sunny skies was total-eclipse style darkness with a great thunderstorm rolling through. About five of us at work stood just outside the door under an overhang and watched the storm come in.
