Awsome Weather

When I first moved to Dubbo from the coast my husband told me that one of the most amazing things I would see here would be the storms. The central west of NSW was deep in a drought that had so far lasted about 10 years (don't quote me on that as I'm just going on local folklore with this figure) so I was a bit sceptical about getting awesome storms, plus I had seen some pretty awesome storms on the coast although were I lived was pretty lucky that it tends to get the tail ends of the nastiest storms. How wrong I was, the storms here often don't produce much in the way of wetness but what they lack in actual precipitation they make up for in wind and lights.

I've tried a few times to catch the fierceness of these storms in photos and failed with my little point and click camera to catch much of interest. I can't catch the lightening even though these storms usually hit at night, my camera turns out very grainy pictures when I try to open the shutter for long enough to catch the flashes. Or maybe it's just me.

The last week or so we've had some amazing high temperatures that hit us very suddenly. We went from comfortable mid 20's to the high 30's pretty much overnight and that's just a perfect recipe for a roaring storm. Which hit us yesterday. As I cooked dinner yesterday evening Terry called me outside to come look at the clouds that were building up.

I ran back inside for my camera.

I couldn't decide which photos I like the most so get ready to see a lot of pics!!

These pics are all taken of the Eastern side of the sky, the sun was setting behind me and reflecting off the tops of the clouds on the other side of the sky, the effect was amazing.

Those clouds rolled almost straight over the top of us, we got a bit of wind, not enough rain to touch the meter and an amazing light show up high (which I didn't even bother to try to photograph). On the other side of town about 3 km's from us they got hit hard with rain, wind and lightening and about 40km's away they had a huge hail storm.

On this side of the sky the sun was setting just below those clouds.

And lighting up the clouds from behind almost giving them a halo effect.

When I turned back around after checking out what the sunset was doing I was confronted with a bank of storm clouds that was building to something special.

 

Then I went back to my front door and got this last shot before the sun went down and I lost the effect.