'Greyhound' - Joanna Pocock
4 hours ago
Showing posts with label lightning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lightning. Show all posts
Monday, July 26, 2010
way slow lightning
Watch the timestamp move. The whole video is slowed down to 1/300 speed.
It's interesting to watch the big bolts form, and disappear, but I am in love with all the tiny baby bolts.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Dry Lightning...
I was awakened at about 4:00 this morning by thunderboomers and rain. I had to go cover our chickens, who perch on top of their hutch rather than inside, because it's higher, and won't always come in out of the rain.
Huge thunderstorms aren't that common here, and this one wasn't huge, but like too many of ours in the summer, was relatively dry, bringing no relief for the drought, but serious fire danger in our parched mountains.
It the same time, it's amazing and nifty. At our house, most of the thunder was about twenty-blue-tomcats away, and I wasn't one bit concerned. Our noise-phobic dog slept through them.
Avram Cheaney got a fabulous recording of the thunder, and that's what sent me geographile-ward to make this post. Go listen:
THUNDER! (Oh. And car alarms.)
Cory Dalva got a great picture that's too copyrighted to embed.
Huge thunderstorms aren't that common here, and this one wasn't huge, but like too many of ours in the summer, was relatively dry, bringing no relief for the drought, but serious fire danger in our parched mountains.
It the same time, it's amazing and nifty. At our house, most of the thunder was about twenty-blue-tomcats away, and I wasn't one bit concerned. Our noise-phobic dog slept through them.
Avram Cheaney got a fabulous recording of the thunder, and that's what sent me geographile-ward to make this post. Go listen:
THUNDER! (Oh. And car alarms.)
Cory Dalva got a great picture that's too copyrighted to embed.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Who ya gonna call?
Sometimes I wish California had the lightning storms they do back east.
We definitely get lightning, and parts of the state get intense lightning.
When I was little, in Shasta County, the grid wasn't as robust as it is now. We'd get days where the temperature would be 100, then 105, then 110, and sticky humid, unlike what we're used to in parts of California that aren't the northwestern corner. Then kaboom, the angels would start bowling, as Mom described it, and we'd have a huge storm, and the rain would pour. The power would go out, and we'd eat hot dogs cooked on unbent metal hangars in the fireplace, and pop popcorn in my mom's old campfire popping basket, and toast marshmallows, and sing. We were a girlscouty sort of family like that. Then we'd go to bed, and at some point the next morning, the power would come back on, usually just in time to power our tiny air conditioning unit in the living room so that as the temperatures rose back up into the 90s, we could lie in front of it and read. If the gutters were still running, we'd go block off the storm drain with detritus and walk around in our boots or pretend to fish.
There are other parts of the state that get lightning storms. But for the most part, we don't get big thunderboomers in California, the storms slide on overhead and aren't terribly dramatic.
We worry a bit when they come over, sometimes, as our summers tend to be dry, and a dry lightning storm can be troublesome. But lightning doesn't terrify me the way it can people in, say, Florida, where death by lightning is generally understood as one of the ways to go.
We definitely get lightning, and parts of the state get intense lightning.
When I was little, in Shasta County, the grid wasn't as robust as it is now. We'd get days where the temperature would be 100, then 105, then 110, and sticky humid, unlike what we're used to in parts of California that aren't the northwestern corner. Then kaboom, the angels would start bowling, as Mom described it, and we'd have a huge storm, and the rain would pour. The power would go out, and we'd eat hot dogs cooked on unbent metal hangars in the fireplace, and pop popcorn in my mom's old campfire popping basket, and toast marshmallows, and sing. We were a girlscouty sort of family like that. Then we'd go to bed, and at some point the next morning, the power would come back on, usually just in time to power our tiny air conditioning unit in the living room so that as the temperatures rose back up into the 90s, we could lie in front of it and read. If the gutters were still running, we'd go block off the storm drain with detritus and walk around in our boots or pretend to fish.
There are other parts of the state that get lightning storms. But for the most part, we don't get big thunderboomers in California, the storms slide on overhead and aren't terribly dramatic.
We worry a bit when they come over, sometimes, as our summers tend to be dry, and a dry lightning storm can be troublesome. But lightning doesn't terrify me the way it can people in, say, Florida, where death by lightning is generally understood as one of the ways to go.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
lightning hits the Space Needle
Geology.com, one of my favorite sites for geographilic information, has a fabulous video from May 23, 2009, of lightning hitting Seattle's Space Needle.
Here's the video:
http://geology.com/news/2009/lightning-hits-space-needle.shtml
And poke around geology.com for more nifty stuff.
Here's the video:
http://geology.com/news/2009/lightning-hits-space-needle.shtml
And poke around geology.com for more nifty stuff.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
totally random find while stumbling around in slow motion videos on youtube
Holy cow this is amazing lightning video! The annotations label the various leaders.
I grew up in a part of California that has summer lightning storms, but even those amazing storms weren't like storms can be in other parts of the US and the world. Lightning still enthralls me, rather than scaring me.
I sat through one storm in Arizona, once, under shelter, watching the occasional distant glow of a transformer exploding under a strike. That was enough of the big stuff.
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