Where on Earth are you!? Show us the sights from your part of the world

Lots of lightning in Cardiff tonight. Very, very quiet thunder. @Whistle_Pig do you know why?

More lightning in one storm than even Florida but the thunder is a gentle rumble rather than a proper boom. And we’re right underneath it

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I’ve once heard thunder over snow. Weird sound.

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Assuming that by right underneath it, you mean that the flash and the bang are almost simultaneous?

Since thunder is a pressure wave (i.e. sound) I would suppose that the audibility is affected by, most obviously, distance, but also things like wind shear, terrain, and the temperature layering of the lower atmosphere.

Nerdy levels of detail available on request :grin:

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Photo grabbed from fb, so tried to keep the credit where it’s given.
The Kelpies during a big thunderstorm the other night that left lots of flooding on the east of Scotland. This is just down the road from where I work, but on the west where I live we had pretty much no weather for once, so it was a surprise to be driving through flooded roads to get into work.

Awesome picture though

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Looks like a rock album cover, awesome!

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We had the same thing last night! (we’re a couple hours drive from Cardiff). Towering clouds directly overhead that kept lighting up but the thunder was faint. I counted 20 seconds between lightening flashes and thunder, so my guess is that the storm was very high above us. There were no cloud-to-ground strikes. Could that be why it was so quiet @Whistle_Pig?

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If you’re interested in lightning and don’t already know blitzortung.org you probably should. :slight_smile:

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Seems very likely! Thunder clouds often reach up to the stratosphere (10km +) so the lightning could be right above you, but still quite far away.

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Not exactly where I live, but probably about a 6 hour drive due west:

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Nerd away please.

I love spectacular weather. We took a little video last night. In 10 seconds there were at least 3 flashes. The storm was sat round us for half an hour so there must have been a hundred flashes. At one point we seemed to be in the middle with lightning in 3 different places.

Last year, on our last night at Disney there was a ridiculous storm. There was a strike somewhere on property and the entire site (all 4 theme parks, Disney Springs and the hotels) lost power.

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I’ve never seen those before. They freak me out

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we spent our “festival” vacation by going hiking in the Black Forest and visiting our natural history museum which has added a coral reef since my last visit 15 years ago (and we met friends twice!)

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That’s one place that I regret not having visited when in Germany, the Black Forest. And I hope is not mainly because its name reminds me of the Black Forest Gateau :yum: :yum:

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I spent so much if my childhood visiting grandparents who were vacationing in the Black Forest that I avoided the place for many years. But right now it is one of the great places we can do day trips. The National Park is one of the few Germany has created and they have been working to make nice hiking trails all over…

Ps I never had a piece of Schwarzwälderkirschkuchen in my life—I hate cherries. But you can get it everywhere here…

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Oh, we can get it everywhere here as well, although I guess there is nothing like the real deal at origin.

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To break in our new hiking boots we took a 7km “walk” from our home… there are some “recreational” woods there that are usually filled with joggers in the mornings and afternoons…

If you walk to the end you get to a) a meat factory the smell is just yikes, but so far no Covid outbreak there, it’s a newish one maybe that helps and b) a small airfield for so-called “Segelflugzeug” (the dictionary suggested a very verbatim translation of “sail plane” or maybe “glider”) and as the weather was both sunny and windy optimal conditions… we watched a few starts. They get pulled up with a cable winch and it’s quite fascinating how fast they are up there.

A friend of mine used to have a license and said it was better than any kind of roller coaster you can imagine. The planes are quite expensive and so usually belong to a club…

(as you can see by the age of the cars you have to have your priorities straight for this hobby)

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Generally British English favours “glider”, American “sailplane”.

I went for a short walk yesterday; there’s a golf course and various bits of woodland on the hill above where we live.



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Ah, brings back memories of my youth :grin:

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My grandfather used to set altitude records piloting sail planes here in Idaho (US) and I spend a lot of time as a little kid at the gatherings. It was one of those things that was wonderful to watch as a kid, and I’ve never been able to find something that quite matches it as an activity for my own children.

We are in Boise, Idaho. Normally, it looks pretty much like this, but with a few buildings (this is in the Sawtooths, about 2.5 hours away:

Right now, however, it looks sort of like if you smeared peanut butter all over that picture, because we are in the midst of our annual 5th Season. We have Fall, Winter, Spring, and The Entire State is On Fire.

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Now those look like proper mountains. When I flew to Boise last year to check it out as a possible place to move to, one of its minor disappointments was that the elevations to its northeast were so unimpressive; from looking at Google Maps I had expected something more dramatic. This scene looks more like the northern horizon from where we lived in Riverside, which we really loved looking at, especially during the months when there was snow on the peaks. Though as it turned out we ended up in Kansas, in an area that seems to have nothing more than hills; the most impressive thing hereabouts is the breadth of the sky.

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