A slow-moving storm allowed me to get photographs of lightning and a bit of time-lapse video. The best lightning strike of the day was outside of the cloud and started near the top.
Below is a time-lapse video of the storm earlier in its life.
It was a pleasant evening in Sedona watching thunderstorms as the sun sank lower in the western sky. It was mostly clear in that direction allowing sunlight to illuminate storms in the east. This is one of my favorite setups: clear in the west and stormy in the east.
The setting sun produced wonderful pastel colors on the clouds and occasionally illuminated the rock spires and buttresses in the middle distance. And after sunset, distant storms showed large anvils along with occasional bolts of lightning.
The past few days have produced interesting storms across northern Arizona.
An isolated storm developed around sunset and produced both wonderful colors and lightning. Most of the lightning, however, was on the other side of the updraft so the storm instead was lit from the inside like a lightbulb. The storm colors and lightning was nicely reflected in the waters of the Kachina Wetlands.
A few days later a large line of convective storms moved southwestward across the state and produced a haboob in the lower (and drier) elevations. As the leading edge of the rain-cooled air moved across the San Francisco peaks the clouds quickly enveloped the mountains. About an hour later, the shelf cloud arrived in Sedona and new storms began to develop.
We have had an extended period of heavy rain across Northern Arizona this week with some of the 7-day rainfall totals exceeded 5 inches. After a night of heavy rain we had several hours of fog and low clouds the following morning. I went to Anderson Mesa southeast of Flagstaff to get above the fog. Unfortunately, the fog layer was too deep and there was also a layer of clouds above so there was no morning light. Still, the fog drifting through the Lower Lake Mary area was interesting.
Later in the morning I shot this photo of the lifting fog and low clouds with the San Francisco Peaks in the distance.
All this rain has brought out the wildflowers, including these sunflowers found on the edge of the recently completed Sheep Crossing Trail, part of the Flagstaff Urban Trail System (FUTS).
The North American Monsoon has been sputtering—for lack of a better term—the past week or two. We get a few days of storms followed by a hot and dry period. Finally, however, moisture is beginning to increase and we are seeing more storms. I have tried several times this year to get great photographs of storms and lightning but my success rate has been pretty low.
Here are a few photographs from the past week.
And, finally we have a time lapse of the same storm that produced the lightning above. The video is 200x real time; from the motion it can be seen that the storm has some slow rotation. This storm moved off the higher terrain and became severe as it neared the Camp Verde area.
The weather models have been consistent with forecasting a significant increase in storm activity next week.