Tuesday, July 21, 2009

we asked for rain (not snow) and we got it!

Things over here are well and calm.

But last night, it was the opposite of calm when it came to our weather. The thing that we're learning about CO is that it's DRY, DRY, and very HOT during the summer. But not like Pheonix hot, because that would be just too crazy. There's such a misconception about the weather here in Denver. Everyone asks us "so how's the snow? where's the snow? snooooowwww???" And it's so funny because it's the opposite here. It's actually hotter here for the most part than in Maryland. Well, so far at least.
Denver is a valley.. but there is snow on the highest peaks of the mountains here in Colorado and it's really cool to look of in the distance and see that when it's 92 degrees here in our area. If you step into some shade, however, the heat isn't so bad. It's not sticky, messy, humid weather like we've been used to our whole lives. Which brings me to the weather of last night..

The sky gave way to some incredibly strong storms that moved through here last night and it's the craziest thing I've ever seen. In Maryland, I've seen Tropical Storms, strong thunderstorms, that type of typical mid-atlantic weather. But last night, all hell broke loose. And what's really strange is that nothing showed up on the radar so the area was totally clear. And then 10 minutes later, we're relaxin' and watching Seinfeld (at about 10:20pm) and the alerts were on the bottom of the tv screen warning some other counties of severe weather. And then a minute later, our county is listed at the bottom..a big blast of wind comes through our neighborhood, it starts to rain, the electricity goes out, and the rain and wind REALLY pick up..... you could hear it howling all around at different directions out there... really strong wind..the hail starts to fall and hit our windows (which by the way, it hails here almost every time it storms) and the lightening..oh my goodness...the lightening. After about 10-15 minutes of intense rain, the sky, we finally notice, is WHITE, the tornado siren goes off, the rain is slowing down, and the air is still. The lightening was the biggest thing to seem to reach it's intensity..it literally looked like a downtown Baltimore club outside..strobe lights going off in all directions in the sky and this went on for over an hour. It was the oddest, neatest, scariest, and coolest thing to watch.

Oh and the tornado warning? didn't last long. It went off for only a few minutes and right when we getting ready to take it seriously, wake the kids and head to a safer spot, that's when it ended. We listened and watched closely to see what our neighbors were doing, also since it's easy to hear and see activity in our 7-plex. Luckily, we live in the garden level, so finding a safe place for tornado activity is close.
Here are a few photos of the sky during the lightening.. please note that these were taken around 11pm last night (and not at sunset like they sort of appear)




What's even crazier is that we lucked out when it came to our power being off- it was off from 10:30(ish) to about 6:30 this morning. Some people in our area still have no power. This morning we found out that 2 tornadoes had touched down but in 2 other areas not too terribly close. We also lucked out because some other areas not too far away had far worse damage to trees, windows, car windows and larger hail and more rain.
I wanted to see what color the cell was on the radar and finally just found out that it was purple. lol wow. It's kind of funny to hear the meteorologists talk about it on the local news because they, too, were blown away with these storms.
And here is a video clip of the lightening.. if you want, feel free to just skip to the .46 mark for the best shot... (we need to get Quicktime Pro to edit these).


3 comments:

Kristin said...

Welcome to Colorado, right!?

the nervous mom said...

Got that right!
I absolutely love the weather here. Not boring in the least. lol

Anonymous said...

I love these lightning pictures! PP