A soon-to-be tornado and other meteorological disappointments

We start this post with a chase that began way behind schedule. I had just arrived home when I realized a storm had popped up and was moving into the area I had just been. I grabbed my stuff -- or so I thought -- and left. I saw a nice gust front move northeastward as I raced to get in front of it along Interstate 526, an intended beltway that partially encircles Charleston. I took this shot by sticking my camera out my window at 70 mph and snapping away. Just happened to catch a bolt.

I continued to play catchup and took this shot while I was at a stoplight. Some spectacular lightning was coming from these clouds, backdropped by a golden sunset.

Another shot of the severe thunderstorm as I drove along North Rhett Avenue in North Charleston.

I decided that a shipping facility with heavy equipment was the best place to pull over and take some shots of the storm before it blew over me.

The clouds were ragged and interesting when lit by the setting sun, but lightning wasn't frequent at this point, unfortunately.

The sun began to shine through the light rainfall on the south side of the thunderstorm.

I passed Hanahan, where I tried to snap a few pics of lightning striking an airplane, then drove here, to Goose Creek. These low clouds seem consistent with a wall cloud, which is often a precursor to a tornado. Indeed, about 10 minutes later, a tornado warning was issued on this portion of the thunderstorm. A funnel cloud was spotted and filmed in the Francis Marion National Forest, well to the northeast of this location. Unfortunately, I had to snap this with a wide-angle lens because I had forgotten a memory card for my Nikon, to which my telephoto was affixed.

On an earlier day, I was in a community on Johns Island, reporting about a homicide that disrupted sleeping neighbors. En route back to the office, I saw sheriff's vehicles speeding to an unknown location. I followed them to this marina, where a man had been reported missing and was thought to have drowned. He lived on a boat here. I was distracted by far-off clouds that were part of a severe thunderstorm well to the north of the St. Johns Yacht Club.

This was a rather large anvil cloud, and I could hear thunder in the distance. No lightning was apparent.

This was the faraway storm, which was pretty much stationary over Summerville, which is about 30 minutes north of Charleston. I took this shot from the roof of The Post and Courier building just before the storm fizzled out.

On yet another day, I was driving home form West Virginia, where I visited my beautiful girlfriend, when I encountered some thunderstorms. Above is a shot of a few mammatus clouds that I snapped after briefly exiting Interstate 26 just south of Columbia, S.C.

I sort of liked this thin cloud on the opposite side of the sky from the thunderstorm. It was nearly sunset.

I tried taking photos of some spectacular lightning that I witnessed as I drove over the interstate. But all I got was some purple sky.

On another day near Ravenel, a small community west of Charleston, I tried photographing some interesting cloud cover associated with a storm that was, again, well off to the north. I was expecting the storm to move into the area, but it died instead. This is a shot of a "Jacob's ladder" as sunshine pierced the blanket of clouds.

I went out for a run one day and parked my vehicle outside the area Home Depot. That's my starting point for a little route I do. And I happened to take a liking to the clouds, the sun behind them, the shadow they were casting and the jet streaking through all the crepuscular-ray goodness.

I missed you, clouds

On one afternoon of thunderstorm warnings, I was out for my daily jog when the remnants of one system blew through. The storm had dissipated when it reached downtown Charleston, but these mammatus clouds were a nice treat. I took this shot next to some old smokestacks along East Bay Street.

South Carolina isn't Central Florida when it comes to active weather, but it's still the hot South, so thunderstorms do happen. A few weeks ago, we had a couple of days of atmospheric convection, which really kicked off the hot and stormy season.

These are some shots I got over the past several weeks.

I took several photos with my iPhone as I jogged over the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, which connects Charleston with the town of Mount Pleasant. The sun was filtering nicely through the clouds.

A large anvil cloud was associated with the storm that eventually died. This is the northern edge of it as I entered the final stretch of my run.

This was a long-lasting rainbow in Charleston - the other Charleston, in West Virginia - on St. Patrick's Day.

No, I did not find the gold.

On another day, I was waiting around for a line of thunderstorms to make its way to the Charleston area. About the time I snapped this shot of the distant clouds, a severe thunderstorm warning was issued.


I was traveling in the wrong direction when a tornado warning was declared in a different storm to the west. I turned around and took this shot with my iPhone as I tried to reach the tornado-warned system.


I saw the towering cumulonimbus cloud in the distance as I sped toward the storm.

I tried to no avail to find something interesting in this mess of cloud cover.

I looked all around at the clouds off U.S. 17 but couldn't really see anything interesting.

These clouds were turbulent and being whipped around by high winds. But I saw nothing that remotely resembled circulation.

On yet another evening, I left for a quick trip to the store without taking my camera. I knew, just knew when I left that I would end up regretting it. Sure enough, when I stepped out of Walmart, a large rainbow was arcing over this marsh, with these pink clouds in the background. It would've been a perfect shot. When I finally got home and grabbed my camera, it was gone.

On this day, the National Weather Service issued some severe thunderstorm warnings to the west and north of Charleston. As I caught a glimpse of this in the distance, I thought it was going to be something good.

Alas, it was just a line of dark clouds with nothing exciting following it.

On yet another day, more recently, I saw some pileus clouds atop some distant showers. Seemed liked a promising sign of storminess to come.

I then drove out west of Charleston and looked over the marshland along U.S. 17 while waiting for a line of thunderstorms to roll into the area.

I caught a few lightning bolts in the distance, but I had just removed my lens to switched it out when lightning struck directly nearby and directly in front of me. And of course, I missed it.

This system actually got better organized as it moved over me. A shelf cloud began forming overhead.

I followed the storm eastward to the Ravenel Bridge, under which I took shelter and tried to snap a few shots. Nothing special.

A lucky rainbow

I'm clearly getting behind on posting, so I'm just going throw things out there. This was a rainbow that formed around 6 p.m. one recent day. I had been inside all day up until that point because I had been sick and home from work. It was pure coincidence that I left my apartment for the first time just as the full rainbow formed. Luck helps in photography sometimes. ... Too bad there's an ugly apartment complex in the foreground.

Anvils and crescents

On the evening of Sept. 29, several large thunderstorms popped up over the center of Florida. Their anvil clouds combined with a sunset and a setting moon to make for a colorful spectacle. The above photo shows the crescent moon and the edge of an anvil.

I've been lazy in the photo-taking department recently, so all of these ones were taken without the aid of a tripod. So they might be grainy and blurry. Sorry.

Here's a better view of an anvil, with my lovely apartment complex in the foreground. These clouds are especially ominous when there are few other random clouds floating around in the sky, which was the case on this evening. It's a stark contrast.

This shows the meeting point of two anvils.

I also drove briefly to the east, where a separate phenomenon was created by the anvils in the west. When such large clouds break up the rays from a setting sun, anticrepuscular rays tend to appear off to the east. These rays appear to be emanating from the eastern horizon, but they're actually coming from the setting sun in the west (of course) and are being bent by Earth's curvature.

You gonna recycle that water?

Central Florida's rainy season is coming to a close, which reminded me of a photo I neglected to share when I took it. This shows my workplace, Florida Today in northern Melbourne. I swear, the building is 90 percent glass, which is downright birdbrained in Florida. Pretty much every window, especially the skylights above the building's longest hallway, leaks. That's why these recycling bins are set up along the entire span: to catch the invading droplets. This sight provides a chuckle every wet season.

Finally, a decent lightning storm while I'm not at work

I walked out of work Friday evening and checked the radar on my iPhone. It showed a big, almost stationary blob of red just to the west of Cocoa. Seemed like a good photo op for stormy clouds and lightning. The above is a composite of a few lightning photos I took over a 15-minute period at the Lone Cabbage Fish Camp on the St. Johns River.

I started the evening at a park on the north side of State Road 520, which runs westward into a remote, swampy area. It had a good view of this gust front, with a somewhat red post-sunset sky in the background.

I switched to a park on the south side of State Road 520 so I could get a better view of the storm's structure. The lightning was flashing frequently, highlighting the striations in this shelf cloud. Visible bolts, however, were few and far between until the storm got closer.

This shot shows a lightning strike, but the area of the bolt is overexposed, so you can't make it out.

The green, white and red lights on an airboat that went by oddly made an Italian flag over the river's surface. Weird, huh?

I went back over to the north side of the roadway, where there seemed to be a better view of the lightning bolts.

The storm was painfully slow in moving eastward toward my location. I'm betting its clip was less than 5 mph.

I always try to focus on power towers, since they're tall, and lightning loves tall things. This was never struck, however.

It eventually started sprinkling, and since I was exhausted from a long workweek, I called it an evening.