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All Images Copyright Terry Pallister
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| While working
late this night, I took a break and walked to the back door of the airport
and saw a storm far out over the Lake covering a large part of the horizon
from NW to NE. I don't know how active it was before I discovered
it (probably very active knowing my luck), but the latter stages of the
storm produced some unusual and intriguing shots about 6 to 10 miles away.
What I was able to get occurred between 9:15 and 9:30 pm. The lightning
followed some strange paths, darting up and down as if it was confused
about where it wanted to go. Wish I'd seen the whole storm.
The first two shots on the top row are 2 frames from the same flash. The 2 pix on the bottom row are of the storm's last visible streaks. For this one the camera was aimed at the best part of the flash. |
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| This nice shot from a storm with little lightning occurred about 4:15 pm a mile off to the NW over the Lake. |
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| Frustration and success in this storm that rolled in from the NE toward the airport just about 4:45 pm. Strong gusty winds made setting up difficult. When the winds got too strong I stopped recording to take the camera off the tripod before the rains hit. While changing to holding the camera a beautiful strike hit next to the windsock about 500 feet from me. What a shot it would have made. The rain and wind moved in and nothing struck in range for some time. Finally at 5:12 pm a bolt struck dead center in my view just 0.25 miles away looking NW toward the lake with lighter rain coming down at this point. Most of the lightning struck on the other side of the building. This storm marked the end of frequent thunderstorm activity for the year. |
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| Working long hours right through weekend had its pay back with a storm. The drawback was that it began as a shower over the airport in mid-afternoon that slowly drifted NNW over the Lake. It kept looking like it was trying to increase in size and expand back over me for the entire rest of the day. A little before 5 some lightning and thunder began on the southern end of the storm. I set up the camera and got the 2 shots above about 4:55 pm. The first of these is one of my personal favorites. The lightning ended, but the storm still held on for hours longer. It is very unusual for a small complex of thunderstorms to form and persist for so many hours in a nearly stationary tropical airmass. It first formed about 3 pm and didn't die out until 9 pm. It only moved a total of 15 miles in its 6 hour life! |
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| As daylight came to a close for the day, lightning in the storm became visible well out over the Lake. The storm had expanded in size. Lightning was striking erratically from NW to NE between 12 and 15 miles away. I had to choose an area to zoom in on to get decent shots. I was rewarded with occasional nice looking strikes beginning at 7:45 and continuing until about 8:25 pm. |
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| After it became completely dark I noticed a few anvil type crawlers poking out from the upper cloud area. I zoomed back out hoping to catch some neat crawlers. There never were any as such, but about 8:25 pm something else began to happen. Several times lightning shot out of the cloud and connected to the water. They are not uncommon at all, but most of the time the flash is hidden by the cloud until it comes out at the bottom of the cloud base. Flashes called "a bolt from the blue" are the same type where the lightning strikes far away from any clouds. Watching the video tape frame by frame shows the steady progression of the lightning flash going across the sky and then down to the ground. These flashes signaled the death stage of the storm, because in just 5 minutes the cloud-to-ground lightning ended at 8:30 pm. Weakening flickers of lightning in the clouds ended just before 9 pm. |
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| The 3 pictures
above show part of the most spectacular of these bolts from the blue.
The lightning first shot straight out from the cloud and then it turned
downward toward and into the water. The whole flash lasted almost
a full second with 4 major bright completions to the water like the last
image, and each was always separated by a frame with no visible lightning.
The branches coming out the main channel disappeared after the first completion
to the water. It seems like the lightning is at first trying to figure
out where it wants to go. Then, suddenly, it makes up its mind and
rushes down to the water. It sends out branches to search for its
final water target. Once the target is made, the lightning no longer
needs the branches to search for a strike point, and so they disappear.
This strike was about 10 miles off, well away from the cloud. The second image above shows the ghosting effect, making the branching look like it was coming down onto the airfield. It was quiet at the airport. A little over 50 seconds after the flash, a loud succession of booms reached me. Even though the lightning was so far away, the sound was still strong enough to rattle windows and other objects. A very large amount of charge must have been transferred in the strike. The strike hit in the open water of the Lake, so the loud booming cannot be related to the lightning striking a power transformer, metal storage unit, or other solid object. After watching this strike frame by frame on the VCR at home over and over, I said to myself that this strike looks like "Evil Lightning" and that something bad was going to happen. 4 days later I was to learn that my faithful and loving companion, Nikki, who this site is dedicated to, was developing incurable kidney failure. The next time I was to get part of another positive flash with evil looking branching on tape, was on July 10, 1998, which was 2 days before Nikki lost her battle with kidney failure. Thus, I have called this first flash "The Omen, Part 1", and the one on July 10, 1998, "The Omen, Part 2." Just a plain coincidence? The scientific mind will say, yes. But, if you read Nikki's story there are other "coincidences" that are not related to lightning that are just too "coincidental" to just keep passing them off as such. Oh, well. |
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| This storm formed
about 15 minutes before I got onto the scene at 2:40 pm. Much of
the lightning was coming out of the base of the storm about 3 to 4 miles
to the SSE. So, I zoomed in somewhat. A big strike hit right
in the middle of the camera's view 2 miles away. The storm looked
like it would really get going, but it collapsed and died out by 3 pm.
The overpass you see so clearly was built in late 1996. It has done a great deal to detract from my taking lightning pictures in the front of the airport. This affects more than one third of the view area on this side of the building. Trees block views for another third of the view area. This storm was the last I could tape for 1997. There was one more 2 nights later, but I had a meeting I couldn't get away from in time. El Nino was causing pressures aloft to build which suppressed thunderstorm activity as well as tropical activity. The weather turned very dry with a 32 day consecutive period without a drop of rain anywhere around New Orleans. The record longest spell without even a trace of rain is 40 days, although there has never been a particular calendar month with no rain. What storms that did occur through the winter and early spring never gave me a single strike on tape. Several storms occurred at 5 and 6 am, but I wasn't getting up for those. January 1998 was a very wet month compliments of El Nino, when nearly 20 inches of rain fell, setting a new city record for the month. |