A Few Of My Favorite Thunderstorms

A thunderstorm looms over an Addison County,
Vermont farm house in 2013

It's one of those lazy days of summer in which I don't feel like doing much, or thinking about anything.

Since there's a chance of scattered thunderstorms late this afternoon and evening, I'm just going to throw up a few of my favorite Vermont thunderstorm photos in recent years.

We tend not to get those super dramatic storms like in the Great Plains and Midwest, but Vermont summer storms are impressive, but maybe in a more subdued, artistic fashion

Today's storms are unlikely to be severe, but they might be on the strong side in a couple places. They might even approach severe limits east of the Green Mountains, but those would be very few and far between.

If these storms develop, and it it IS an if, I hope they'll at least be photogenic, like past storms I've seen.

Very likely you've seen them before, but they're worth another look.  Click on each image to make them bigger and easier to see.

I'll even throw in a video at the bottom of this post.

So here we go:

A distant thunderstorm at sunset a few years ago.
Thie photo was taken in St. Albans, Vermont.
The storm was in northern Addison County,
Vermont, so quite a ways away. 

A menacing shelf cloud over St. Albans Bay, Vermont, July 2013.

Chaotic skies over St. Albans, Vermont May, 2014

Starksboro, Vermont, June 2015

Developing thunderstorm looking west from St. Albans, Vermont
July, 2016

A thunderhead north of St. Albans, Vermont creates a profile
portrait, July, 2019

Developing thunderstorm at sunset, June 2020

Now a video: One of the most intense, favorite thunderstorms I've experienced, July 4, 2012. I feel bad for the dude on the bicycle 18-19 seconds in:

A Decent Friday Sunset In St. Albans, Vermont

This might be old news, and maybe I should have shared these last night, but I had  pretty decent sunset Friday evening in St. Albans, Vermont.

Skies were still rather dark and cloudy after a weak cold front passed by. As we approached sunset, a narrow band of clearing set up on the western horizon.

First, the low angle sun lit up the trees in the woods in back of my house. Then the sun went below the horizon, and the sky lit up.   It was definitely nice to enjoy this from home!

You can make the photos easier to see and bigger by clicking on them. Scroll down for a look at all of them

Ice Storms That Aren't Destructive Are Actually Pretty Cool

Icy berries in my St. Albans, Vermont yard on Sunday.

Now that we know the northwestern Vermont ice storm of 2020 was not as bad as feared, we can actually enjoy the beauty and oddities that freezing rain brings.

Oh sure, some people lost power for a little while, a few people have damaged trees, and the roads weren't all that great in the immediate aftermath of the ice.

But given we avoided wholesale destruction (at least in Vermont) of the Great Ice Storm of 1998, it was good to go out and actually enjoy the ice-altered scenery.

Since temperatures will probably stay below freezing, probably until Tuesday, and there should be a little sunshine here and there to light up the ice, there will probably be more photogenic moments with the ice still covering everything.

An icy bramch in my St. Albans, Vermont yard on Sunday.

Some of the photos that I took for this post are pretty. Some just journalistically document what the ice did.

Either way, it was still good to get out and examine what icy artistry Mother Nature gave us.  When you see this post, definitely respond with your own photos of what you saw in the ice. I'd love to see it.

I"m not a big fan of winter. It's my fourth favorite season, to be honest. Plus, most of Vermont missed out on the ice, so the great majority of Vermonters missed out on the beauty of the ice. But that's OK, there will be other days, with snow, with sun, with ice, with frost, that will highlight Vermont's beauty

Just be ready with your cameras, folks!

Scroll down and click on all the photos in this photos in this post to make the bigger and easier to see.

Birch trees bend under the weight of ice  left by this weekend's
freezing rain in Alburgh, Vermont. 

Ice laden birch trees sag under the weight of ice Sunday in
Alburgh, Vermont, blocking this driveway. 

A jumble of branches and ice on this St. Albans, Vermont shrub.

A tree sags under the ice in Alburgh, Vermont Sunday, while in a background
you can see part of another tree snapped off because of the
weight of the ice. 

An appropriately named street in Alburgh, Vermont Sunday.

An icy white pine branch in St. Albans, Vermont Sunday. 

Random Images And Videos Of Really Cool Weather Phenomenon

Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds over Churchchrist, New Zealand.

I often run across images and videos on social media about weather that doesn't exactly fit what I want to tell you about, but are cool nonetheless.

So why not share them anyway?

The first image is of a rather rare cloud formation and one of my favorites: Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds. The photo was taken at an unspecified date over Christchurch, New Zealand.

The clouds, as you can see, look like breaking ocean waves. They are named for Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz, who studies the physics of the atmospheric instability that creates the clouds.

The clouds form when two different layers of the atmosphere move at different speeds. The upper layer of air is moving faster than the lower levels of the air when these clouds form. The higher winds in the upper layr will sometimes scoop the top of the cloud layer and form these wave-like clouds.



A gorgeous thunderstorm over Grenada, Spain

Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds are not dangerous, and don't produce severe weather. But they are a sign that the air is very unstable, and aircraft flying through areas with these clouds can get in trouble.

I've never personally witnessed Kelving-Helmholtz clouds, and being a weather geek, seeing the clouds is definitely on my bucket list.

The next photo in this post is not a terribly unusual weather phenomenon, but it's a gorgeous photo of a thunderstorm over Granada, a Spanish city in the foothills of that country's Sierra Nevada mountains.  

The Alhambra Palace, a luxury hotel, is in the foreground. Between that building and those dramatic clouds, it makes for just a gorgeous photo.

A dramatic looking but non-lethal avalanche in Juneau, Alaska recently
r

It was taken by Jose Luis Hens Terron.

The next photo was taken on March 3 in Juneau, Alaska.

Amid cold, blue skies, an avalanche descended from the steep mountains surrounding the city. The avalanche caused no deaths or injuries, and damage was minimal.

Pretty cool image of such a snow slide.

Finally, we have some cool images of severe thunderstorms developing in Nebraska about a week and a half ago.

The satellite feed here is mesmerizing, if you are a weather geek like me.

I'll have more images in future posts, because they're piling up left and right, but here's that Nebraska storm outbreak video:

Beautiful Time Lapse of Thunderstorms

A billowing, developing thunderstorm
as viewed from South Burlington,
Vermont last summer.  

Since spring is here and summer is to follow, it's time to cloud watch.

Clouds, at least to me, are usually far more interesting in the spring and summer than in the winter.

There tends to be more showers and thunderstorms during the warmer season, and you get those big billowly towering cumulus, thunderheads and full blown thunderstorms adding interest in drama to the sky.

To get you ready for thunderstorm cloud watching season, there's a beautiful time lapse taking on a summer day last year at the bottom of this post.

In it, you see a thunderstorm to the left dying out, and to the right, a series of cumulus clouds trying, trying, trying to erupt into a thunderstorm.

The efforts repeatedly fail, until suddenly the clouds erupt into a beautiful local thunderstorm.

It doesn't last long, and the new thunderstorm begins to die, but there's a promise of another one soon.

I can just picture myself in that meadow watching the clouds all day. That will happen soon, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, here's the video:

Fascinating Tornado In Australia A Couple Months Back

Tornado sweeps through Dubbo Australia in August.  

A tornado hit the community of Dubbo, Australia back in late August, damaging at least seven homes and causing quite a bit of other destruction in a section of that town in the Australian state of New South Wales.

Yeah, I know this is ancient history, but I just find this particular tornado fascinating.

Two things strike me about the two videos you'll see below.

One is, it's a pretty narrow tornado, but as it gets close in the first video, you can tell how strong it is by how loud it gets as it draws near, and how violently debris is thrown into the air.

The second thing that's interesting in both videos the surrounding areas seem to be having pleasant evening weather conditions. There's quite a bit of blue sky, and the clouds in the background don't seem all that menacing.

Just goes to show that tornadoes don't always have to look black and fearsome to do some serious harm

Here are the videos:

Strangely Hypnotic Grass Blowing In The Wind On A Nice Summer Day

A pleasure of summer: Grass blows in the breeze 

One of the joys of summer is being outside, enjoying a warm breeze.

Or, as the melancholy Don Henley song "End Of The Innocence" goes,

"We'll sit and watch the clouds roll by
And the tall grass wave in the wind."

A guy named Gissur Simonarson in Gjerdrum,  near Oslo, Norway, recently did just that and came back with this strangely mesmerizing, beautiful video of a breezy summer day:

Jay Peak, Vermont Skiers Get Awesome Sky, Impromptu Atmospheric Science Lesson

From @erikosterlund via Twitter, the sky over
Jay Peak, Vermont last Saturday.  

It was the perfect day to ski at the Jay Peak Resort in Vermont, right close to the Canadian border this past Saturday.

The sun came out, the snow was great, the temperature was comfortable.

But what happened in the skies over the mountain Saturday afternoon was worth way more than the price of admission.

Some high, thin clouds, the low angle of the December winter solstice sun, created a spectacular show in the sky.

Skiers at Jay Peak got to witness such atmospheric phenomenon as sun dogs, two sun halos, a sun pillar and something called a circumzenithal arc, among other things.

When there's high, thin clouds, which are made out of ice crystals, you sometimes get halos, sun dogs and the like. But Saturday brought out pretty much all the gorgeous and cool phenomena that cirrus clouds can muster.

Let's explain some of them, for the benefit of those (like me!) who were not lucky enough to be skiing at Jay Peak Saturday afternoon.

We'll start with sun dogs. When the sun shines through the ice crystals in those high thing clouds, a bright spot forms near the sun, at least when the ice crystals are laying flat, in a horizontally.

It's called a sun dog, I think, because it looks like a little companion to the sun, kind of like a dog taking a walk with its owner.

There was also a halo around the sun Saturday afternoon at Jay Peak. Those form when the ice crystals in the high, thin clouds are not all horizonal, but jumbled in different positions.

What must have happened Saturday is a lot of the ice crystals were horizontal, so you got a sun dog, but some of them were more vertical, so you also got a halo around the sun.

In fact, there were two halos around the sun, as you can see in the picture.

Now, what the heck is a circumzenithal arc? Say that five times fast.

A circumzenithal arc forms when sun shines through the top of an ice crystal and is diverted out the side of the crystal instead of going through.

You have to be at the right angle with the sun to see them, and there has to be a relative lack of clouds where the arc forms in order to see it. Jay Peak skiers got lucky.

Circumzenithal arcs are often referred to a upside down rainbows, or, the way I prefer, a grin in the sky.

World "Weather Porn" Stormy Images Emerge Again

A wicked looking storm in Iowa on Sunday.  

Just because it's fun, and there have been plenty of nasty storms worldwide in the past few days, I'll give you a bit of weather porn, as I do occasionally.

Don't worry, for the uninitiated, weather porn is safe for work. It's just images of dramatic or bad storms that's all.

I don't have any photos of the surprise tornado in Worcester,  Massachusetts last evening, so we'll make do with other storms. (Residents had received a tornado warning, but earlier in the day, it seemed doubtful any storms would become that severe in New England)

Click on any of the photos in this post to make them bigger and easier to see.

Lightning lights up an Italian supercell storm.
Photo by Gianluca Prioli.  

The first image in this post, by @NPZChasers, via Twitter, shows a shelf cloud ahead of a severe thunderstorm in Iowa yesterday.  

It looks like a giant whale about to eat the landscape.  No whales actually ate anything in Iowa that I know of, but there were widespread reports of damage in the storms.

The second photograph is an incredible nighttime shot of a supercell thunderstorm at night, lit up by lightning. The photo was taken by Gianluca Prioli in Gabicce Mare, Romagna, Italy.

In this photo from Italy, note the wall cloud (the dark cloud at the bottom of the storm that looks sort of like a fedora.) Wall clouds often, but don't always produce tornadoes. No word on whether a tornado touched down in this storm.  

Lightning in Croatia. Photo by Ivan Rajcic. Add caption

The third image is by Ivan Rajcic, who left his camera lens open as an intense thunderstorm passed through part of Croatia. There was just an incredible amount of lightning with this storm.

Very pretty shot, though, considering the danger involved.