Darwin Lightning and Storm Photos

Storm chasing in the Top End is difficult and there is no doubt that my best lightning photos in Darwin were all taken on the coast. The simple reason for that is the dense bush that surrounds Darwin makes ventage points inland few and far between, and lightning photography quite difficult. On this occasion the storm was actually over land, so I had to take advantage of a local footy ground to get the view I needed. Just as well I found it as these anvil crawlers sure make for nice photographs.

Despite it's tropical location and frequent storms, waterspouts are actually surprisingly rare around Darwin. That's not to say Darwin doesn't see them altogether. This waterspout formed underneath the gust front of a decayed storm as the outflow it produced forced a new updraught to explode into the atmosphere. The updraught must have been strong enough to spin up the low level circulation produced by the guster into a funnel. The waterspout lasted about fifteen minutes until the outflow from the new storm choked it off.

Following photos are of a very electrically active thunderstorm off the coast north of Darwin. It was one of those storms I would have loved to get closer to but actually had no hope in hell of doing it. In the end I photographed the storm from shore at Nightcliff and was actually very pleased with the results as the frequent in-cloud and positive lightning nicely illuminated the storm's structure.