Storm over my house...
 

Just been watching a thunderstorm that has been rumbling away over and around my house for the past 3 hours and is still going as we speak. This has to be the longest lived and one of the most powerful storms that I've ever experienced. It's occuring in 2 seperate places, both to the north and the south, literally lighting up the sky in those places. There've been short bouts of really hard rain too.

So naturally, I've phoned up my buddy and he's come over, we're outside right now on the roof of my house (my room has stairs to the flat roof above it), with a barbeque going, a joint being passed around, listening to the radio on local news listening for weather forcasts. This is being typed on my laptop right now. I swear this is the most fun I've had in ages.

And that's what this thread is about - tell us about any fun weather related stuff that you guys have done. Storm watching, chasing, or just cool/scary weather.

And lets all hope it doesn't rain again! Thank god the barbeque isn't a charcoal one.

EDIT: WOW this is getting intense, very loud thunder and intensely bright lightning.

EDIT EDIT: This is now officially the most powerful storm I've ever seen or experienced. We've had to move inside the tent because of the heavy rain, and we just had a lightning flash just five miles away, that lit up the WHOLE sky like daylight, which was followed by an explosive thunderclap that nearly shattered the windows.

I absolutely love being outside in rainless storms. Especially really windy ones. Clothes and hair whipping around, can't hear your friends screaming, practically being blown over and then blinded as a huge bolt of lightning streaks the sky. Man.

I love that. Lucky. :D

Well, a barbeque, a joint and a super-storm. Sounds like a damn good time.

...Is it windy?

I like being out with a rainless storm also. Must be having one heck of a party with that barbeque eh? ;)

Welcome to my life. :D But then a window breaks when it's the wettest part of the storm. Then, for the rest of the storm, I have a door pressed up against the window. :(

But otherwise, it's all good.

It was cool... it lasted a total of 5 hours, and it's aftershocks are still rumbling away some 14 hours later.

It wasn't particularly windy no, interestingly this storm had none of the usual hallmarks assosciated with thunderstorms. The air wasn't still, and it didn't die off when the rain came, nor was it very stormy, IE no high speed winds. It was just a regular night, with the exception of the fact that there was this huge stormcell in the sky.

I whitnessed a storm yeserday, a small one, it's still thunder and lighting.

Oh, and if there are storms like that, you better have computer switched off. For safety reasons.

For safety reasons?

Apparently it makes your computer burst into flames. I'm sure that if the residence is engulfed by the mighty flame, the inhabitants on the structures interiors will likely parish with it. That is, unless certain fire control services are reached before serious damages are accumulated.

What?

Does the rest of the world have no circuit breakers or fuses?

Heh, I don't know, probably not. My Dad once told me to turn off the comp in a thunder storm, but I didn't understand why.

Circuit breakers probably wouldn't turn off fast enough to prevent a computer from getting fried if a bolt of lightning hit your house. Or the... power line or whatever. Or something. I'm no expert.

I love storms. We get a fair number of them in this here Worshington, at least where I live. They're not usually accompanied by a whole lot of precipitation, except every once in a while when we get one of those torrential downpours that make living in a desert just worth it. Anyway.

Best storm I ever experienced: It was the week I went to summer camp, and our group thingy had chosen that night to do our campout dealy. A couple hours after we were forced to go to "bed" (a sleeping bag, which we had to provide, on a tarp) it started to rain, becoming fairly substantial within a few minutes. We all gathered in the spacious latrine (there was a lot of melodramatic little kid talk about how we were all going to die; I found it pretty amusing, myself, and much better than what we had planned) until a couple camp counselors rode gallantly to our rescue in their noble white steeds (the camp vans)!

Throughout the whole thing there was torrential rain, earth-shaking thunder, and these INCREDIBLY EERIE flashes of lightning that were so diffused by the clouds that you couldn't see where they were coming from, you would just suddenly see the entire sky flash and you would see the dark silhouettes of the trees outlined against it. And the camp was totally flooded for days afterwards. Ya could lose a boot in that mud.

It ROCKED.

That sounds like sheet lightning.

And actually, yes, a fuse would blow in time if a lightning bolt hit it. They're designed so that anything over a certain wattage melts the wire inside nearly instantly. You might get a 1 amp surge at most, which spread out over an entire house system isn't much. That's enough to cause the lights to momentarily become slightly brighter before going out (As a result of the fuse blowing, which trips the circuit breaker and also breaks part of the circuit unless you've got bipass backups).

There's on average 100,000,000 volts at 100,000 amps in a lightning bolt. That's 10,000,000,000,000 (ten billion watts, or 10,000 gigawatts). Each lightning bolt is capable of putting out more power than any single nuclear power plant anywhere on earth. The most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated was rated at 100 megatons, it's light was visible 1000 kilometers away, and at 100 kilometers was capable of inducing 3rd degree burns. The explosion itself was 45 kilometers wide, and it possessed just over 1% of the power of the sun. A lightning bolt however can easily exceed 200% of the power of the sun, often reaching 500%. That's 200 times more powerful, than a bomb which was 7700 times more powerful than the heroshima bomb. In other words, it's equal to a 20,000 megaton nuclear explosive, a device which would be so powerful, detonating it would eject the atmosphere into space, and alter the trajectory of the planet so drastically, that the shift would cause the moon to slingshot itself either out of orbit completely, or into a highly elongated oval orbit.

Now, if that's not capable of melting a 2mm wide by 20mm long strip of solder instantly, then there's no hope for the welding industry.

And since you were using a laptop anyway it would have to strike YOU to have any effect on the thing.

It was sheet lightning anyway, which never comes into contact with the ground. In order for it to be a threat to me, I'd have to be parachuting through the cloud at the moment of static ignition.