12 Pictures in a Storm
The winds and heavy rainfall generated by thunderstorms are serious obstacles to air traffic. When in cruise, airfracts avoid thunderstorm, and when one gets caught by surprise, the resulting damages can be quite impressive. For more information about flying and thunderstorms, look at this post.
To illustrate how bad weather can be under a thunderstorm, I took this series of photo from my balcony. The interval between pictures is about one minute. I tried to stay immobile and did not modify the zoom.
The distance to the large building in the background is 210 meters, according to Google Earth. The visibility reduces each minute, and this is already well below ILS category I, and this is only the begining…
As I used a simple compact camera, I had to turn off the flash to avoid pictures of bad quality, but this lead to too long exposure times, making the pictures fuzzy. However the effects of the wind on the tree are quite impressive.
The most active part of the storm is here. The picture in the middle is in another direction, because nothing was visible in the direction of the tower. The trees on this picture are less than 30 meters away.
Within the three next minutes, visibility increases quickly, and wind speed reduces. The storm is not over, it just moved away.
Needless to say, all approaches to the airport located two miles away were stopped, all planes waiting in holding patterns. I was listening to the approach frequency, and when the storm was over the airport, the controller made the following call: “All stations, surface wind variable 35 knots, gusting 50 knots“.
No pilot answered this call.
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