Posted on 07/17/2023 5:20:55 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
A very INTENSE lightning storm started rolling into Broward County, FL a little after 5 PM on July 6, 2023. I heard the roar of thunder in the distance at that time and checked LightningMaps.Org which revealed a chain of lightning strikes going off in the Everglades west of me. I immediately drove to a nearby location about 10 miles west of the Atlantic and just south of Tamarac and went up to the third floor balcony of a building. I set up my cell camera on a tripod and pointed it almost due west to catch the incoming lightning storm. I recorded the storm with my Samsung Galaxy S20 cell camera set at 60 fps UHD.
The videos you see here were made in a fifteen minute period between about 5:35 and 5:50 PM. For every lightning strike you see there were at least 3 more strikes that were either behind the clouds or out of camera range so probably over 40 nearby lightning strikes during that period. The lightning actually intensified after 5:50 PM but because the strikes were either behind the low clouds or obscured by the very heavy rain that rolled in I was unable to record the lightning strikes after that time.
Due to the high quality of the videos I recorded I am able to show you closeups of the lightning strikes as well as slow them down to 1/4 and 1/16 speeds. The latter speed was quite revealing in that it showed that many of the lightning strikes when first seen as simple solitary strikes were often actually a series of complex strikes.
Oh, and there is ANOTHER storm predicted to roll into Broward today at about the same time as yesterday. Should I record that one too?
PING!
I think Uganda leads the world in the number of lightning strikes but Polk County Florida is the leader in deaths by lightning. Often, powerful strikes come ‘out of nowhere’ with no advance warning.
Watch out for ccd chip burn-in. I had permanent damage to a digital camera from lightning image capture. Now, that was back in 2000. It was a brand new Kodak digital camera and they replaced it without incident. I think the storage module at the time was 64 meg.
That was a long line of of strong t-storms, up to Vero Beach by radar. My mother called yesterday from Martin Co. because it scared her.
Storms in Jupiter, Tequesta yesterday were downright frightening. Top ten I’ve seen in my 35 years here probably.
As far as states go, Florida is the lightning strike capital of the country.......one of at least 20 other life threatening reasons I would recommend people not ever go there......and move there?.......that would be a death wish.
Tell me about it. After recording the video above, I took shelter in the stairwell of the building. After about 40 minutes when the rain started dying down and the lightning strikes became more distant and infrequent, I made a beeline towards my car. About halfway out to the parking lot a YUUUUUGE lightning strike hit near me only about 200 yards away.
Got caught under this line of storms just as we were docking the boat and unloading in Pompano. Quite dangerous, but I was glad we didn’t have the outriggers up at the time. Needless to say we tied up the boat quickly and didn’t eve TOUCH the shore power, which I’ll connect late this morning.
Lately, the storms have been staying inshore and not crossing US 1, which was what we expected yesterday. THAT didn’t happen though.
Great video
I don't think we have that problem anymore. I recorded a lightning strike on a pier at the beach back around 2009 on my cell camera. I thought it was a magnificent shot until I looked at it and that entire strike was blacked out. Low res camera as was typical on cell phones back then.
It is the one you don’t hear that gets you!
Glad you are ok!
Actually that incident with the lightning hitting the pier might have happened 5 years later in 2014 because we were with a friend of my wife’s that we didn’t meet until several years after 2009. No matter. My 2014 android phone also had a low res camera.
I live in Polk County, FL. Lightning has not gotten me yet.
Try harder! :)
Stay Safe, FRiend!
Was that 7/6 or 7/16?
Sorry - I see the title of your thread is 7/16....
7/16. Yesterday. I was going to edit it today but I got so fascinated by the material that I worked from about 7 PM until past midnight.
They say “no rest for the wicked”, you know!!!!
According to the radar, there is a WALL of rain heading this way from out of the Everglades again between 2:30 and 3 PM today. I will be monitoring closely because I want to position myself ahead of it because the best lightning shots are when the storms are rolling in from the distance. Once the storm reaches here then it is hard to see the lightning since we would be engulfed in rain and clouds.
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