North West Lightning and Storm Photos

On my last visit to the Kimberley region of Western Australia in April 2002 I was hoping for some late season storms but was largely disappointed. I did manage to do some lightning photography though. I took these two photos near Home Valley Station on the Gibb River Road. This small late afternoon lightning storm formed very rapidly right on sunset before dying just as quickly about half an hour later.

This storm formed in the early afternoon just east of Pardoo Road House as David Bettini and I were driving to Eighty Mile Beach. I took the photo on the left just as rain was starting to fall. The photo on the right shows the storm a few minutes later, with very heavy rain producing a rain foot under the storm's base.

I took the lightning photo below just north of Marble Bar on the road to Port Headland whilst on a week long trip in the Pilbara region of Western Australia with my mate David Bettini. Storms first developed earlier that afternoon, but most were rather fast moving and also produced heavy rain, making lightning photography near impossible. Later on that night I managed to take this shot as the last of that night's storms were dissipating.

The photos below, which I took over Lake Kununurra, show a squall line approaching Kununurra from the east. After chasing a rotating storm earlier that evening (see Page 3 for details) I noted frequent lightning from what looked to be large storms a long way to the east. A quick check of the radar confirmed presence of storms some 250km away, well in Northern Territory. Amazingly the storms organized into a large squall line which propagated eastwards and reached Kununurra some four hours later!