New paintings and regular art updates.
Current lightning over us. It’s gone dark and rumbly above us. Although the main storms seem to be swirling around Congleton and Stone tonight. The map is from Blitzortung.org and I hope I’m not breaching their copyright. I can hardly see its gone so dark, cumulus clouds boiling above us. I’m glad we live at the bottom of the hill, I think we are less likely to get hit! God’s certainly moving a lot of furniture!
There is a website called blitzortung.org you can open up, and if you look at the live maps you can see lightning strikes as they happen. The site covers the whole world but you can zoom in on it.
Tonight it got very dark and cloudy and we had a few flashes of lightning with rumbles of thunder about 5 to 3 miles away (10 and 6 seconds), Light travels fast, sound follows, so 2 seconds equals a mile away.
We just had some heavyish rain but the storm petered out. Looking at the lightning map, the storm split up into two. The storm stopped about three miles away from here
, but a branch of it was heading towards Crewe. There were over 5 thousand strikes in an hour!
I’ve been interested about lightening since I was talking to an elderly lady about 25 years ago. She said she was in her house several years before that. She had the window open because it was so hot, suddenly a ball of lightening came in through the window and bounced off the floor. She didn’t explain what happened afterwards, whether it just dissipated. But clearly it was not too traumatic. I have heard of ball lightning, so it might have been true….
We went to see the bluebell walk at Rode hall today but stopped to talk to a lady that was very upset and distressed about something.
As we were chatting to her we all got caught in a thunderstorm with hail and heavy rain. We got soaked and decided to abandon the walk. Thankfully I had a discussion with someone from the hall and we can go back on Sunday. Above are pre bluebell walk photos with lowering dark clouds.
The hall is off the A34 between Scholar Green and Rode Heath:
Rode Hall, Church Ln, Scholar Green, Stoke-on-Trent ST7 3QP
What’s something most people don’t understand?
Clouds and fractals
Fjords and lightning strikes
The Mandelbrot set
Strange attractors
Entangled Electrons
Quantum Mechanics
Heisenbergs Uncertainty
These are a few things
I don’t understand!
But I’d like to try….
The cat came in crying!
A sudden thunderstorm
Had spooked her
Flash and thunder together
The road, like a river!
Frightened cat
Eyes wide
Fur soaked.
Now she’s washing
at my feet
Still seeking comfort
Drying her back
with her tongue
Grooming the fear away.
I’m not sure if I’m allowed to use this image of last night’s big thunderstorms. Blitzortung.org shows the movement of thunderstorms across the world with almost live graphics of lightning strikes. I looked a while ago and there is another group of storms coming up from the southwest tonight. I guess we really need the rain, I’m not complaining. I just feel hot and my glasses keep steaming up!
It’s interesting to watch other parts of the world but I wish I could also see rainfall radar at the same time as the thunderstorms may just be showers with rain covering only small areas, like microbursts.
If the cat comes in wet, it’s raining, dry and hot, it’s sunny. If he’s white coloured and cold fur it’s snowing, frosty or hailing. If you can’t see him it’s foggy. If he’s got muddy paws, then there’s a flood. Cats can be weather vanes. If his tail is fluffed up there’s lightning. If his tail is stuck out backwards it’s a force nine gale.
Thankfully he’s never been caught in a hurricane or a tornado. I would not wish that on him. Goodness knows what he would look like then! ❤️
I’ve been keeping an eye out for thunderstorms and lightning after they were forecast for us for the weekend, but apart from some heavy-ish rain tonight, which caused one of the cats to come in looking like a bedraggled wet otter, there hasn’t been much in the way of storms or anything else.
I do check the weather forecast online and noticed as each day came and went the rain symbols dwindled. But I also look at a website called blitzortung.org which shows real time thunderstorms and tracks them with detectors so you can virtually see lightning strikes within seconds of them happening. The strikes are also colour coded so you can see strikes from two hours ago in red, changing to orange and yellow for more recent ones and finally white for the last twenty minutes. So you can actually track where they have been and what direction they are heading in. I think it’s interesting.
I just looked at the UK which was blank. Then Europe where there seems to be a big storm over the toe of Italy. Then I looked at the overview map of the whole world and saw many storms scattered across North America. I hope they are providing much needed rain and are not as severe as the ones that caused major flooding recently.
It might rain today, but most of England is parched. The south east, south midlands, and eastern counties look dry and brown from satellite images. We are in the same heatwave that has affected the rest of western Europe. Forecasts say the weather is due to break soon. But with thundery showers due there is not the persistent rain for many days that would replenish the ground water and because the soil is so hard and dry it is compacted and heavy rain could cause flash flooding…. Oh well, Brits always discuss the weather!
Pressures dropping
Rain may be due
Summer heat
Might just be through?
For now at least
We may be released
From burning temperatures
That decline,
and overtures
Of sudden storms
Or cloudy skies
Showers at last
May soon come fast!
Lightening and thunder
And watery wonder.
Till parched and dry
Is green and spry
Again…
Mallaband-Brown