Mid Winter Lightning ( Australia )

[Michael Thompson]

Fairly rare to get mid winter thunder here in coastal New South Wales, Australia. However with sea surface temperatures around 18C ( 67F ) it just needs some cold unstable mid layer air ( and moisture ). I am hoping it is an omen for the coming season, as the past was terrible.










Regards

 

[Jayson Prentice]

Well done... Always love lightning over the water, wish we could get lightning like that during the winter on the plains!!

 

[Tony Laubach]

Good stuff, dude! As Jayson said, I wish I had water to shoot over around here! Excellent stuff!

 

[Susan Strom]

Very cool!!

I don't know if this is true for you too, but here in the Arizona Desert, the winter lightning has a different appearance than the summer lightning. This desert has two rainy seasons, the monsoon (July-Sept) that comes from Mexico and the winter storms (Oct-Mar) that come from the Pacific. I find the fall and winter lightning looks really different than the monsoon lightning. And the winter stuff is hard to catch too, there is less of it, it is more staccato (it seems) and the storms are moving faster. I only have one wintery-type bolt and it is a fall one.
Fall bolt

Interestingly, my very first storm chase took place during an unlikely time...the month of January. My big trophy for the night was getting rained on and soaked to the skin I did see some weird-looking winter staccato.

 

[Michael Thompson]

Thanks for the comments. The winter lightning here tends to be usually in cloud and short, often those half baked anvil crawler type things, however this storm contained a few CG's.

The water is no doubt a nice foreground, but it is also our worse enemy for summer storms, the sea breeze inversions we get a similar to say Los Angeles.