| Once the rains
stopped at the end of June, things dried out and the heat really came on.
Temperatures soared to the upper 90's and even to 100 +°F on many days.
Temperatures at or above 100°F are very rare here. Finally on
July 14 the atmosphere could stand no more, and storms erupted late in
the afternoon. They moved south over Lake Pontchartrain. Normally,
such storms die out before reaching the south shore, but not today.
In fact, there would be several more such occasions going to the beginning
of September...all resulting from the intense heat and some upper level
disturbances that helped the storms form and move quickly across the lake.
Skies darkened
before 5 pm as the storms pushed toward me. The cells just missed
me as they passed to the east of my spot toward the SSE, but the winds
blasted toward me at 50 to 60 mph, and gave me a rough time trying to steady
the 2 tripods. Visible lightning streaks were not frequent.
Camcorder 1 was able to get a few strikes between 5:15 and 5:30 pm.
The bolts were about 6 miles away. Camcorder 2 didn't get anything
worthwhile during this time.
I was disappointed
as the storms moved moved by. For whatever reason, I stayed and watched.
Just before 6 I saw a crawler and started recording again. At 6 a
terrific intra-cloud lightning discharge with absolutely crazy channels
exploded across the sky right in view of both camcorders (next to the last
shot from Camcorder 1 and the first 2 shots from Camcorder 2 above).
This could only result from the atmosphere being very electrified as a
result of all the intense heat. A less impressive crawler came 5
minutes later as seen in the last picture from Camcorder 1.
After another
5 minutes passed, a tremendous brilliant flash exploded right in direct
view of Camcorder 2 about 2.7 miles away. The bottom row of pictures
above are from this one powerful strike that traveled more horizontally
than it did vertically. 13+ seconds later came this a series of cannonlike
booms of thunder that sounded more like bombs exploding than the rumbling
and booming we typically hear.
I wondered what
caused these late bolts. This is not typical down here in this tropical
climate after a storm has passed on for so long. As I would learn
Augusts 31, these may have been related to lightning shooting up off of
radio towers located about 5 to 6 miles to the SE and SSE from the front
of the airport. Such lightning is extremely rare here, and I had
never seen it before in New Orleans. But, the intense heating that
led to the unusually severe type storms must have been the cause. |
