Stormy Night

Last night I was in the house, working on a rhubarb cake, happily oblivious to the impending weather. Mark went out to ride his bike over to the grocery, and then came right back in and said I had to come outside and see this weather.

We’ve had a stormy spring, and a line of severe storms in the evening is not all that novel these days. But these storms were huge, and beautiful. They were organized along an instability boundary, forming pulse after pulse of circulating, swirling, very high based supercells.

Two things about this storm were extraordinary. The first is the amount of rain it dropped across our area. Nearly 3 inches over just a few hours in the northern part of our city. This is pretty serious rainfall for an area where the average June rainfall is less than 2 inches for the entire month.

The second was the light show. The lightening just poured out of these clouds all night long. Watching the frequent, huge, cloud-to-ground strikes as the storm neared was frightening and incredible. Watching the whole sky flash like a night club as the storms passed over was even more surreal. It was the ultimate “dark and stormy night” last night.

I tried to get a few pictures, but ended up not doing so well. I came inside early too, because the lighting was making me nervous. In the end, my photos weren’t all that impressive, but put together, they make a nice time-lapse view of the storm approaching our neighborhood at dusk last night. It was an amazing show.