Lightning is an interesting subject for photography but how do you get a good shot using a phone camera? With an expensive DSLR camera, you can let the light from the flash trigger the shutter and just set the camera out during a storm for awhile. But there's an easier solution.
Here's a video I took during a Denver thunderstorm a few years back
Once you have the video, it's not difficult to just cut out the shot that you want.
It turns out that they have the same driving forces...mountains and moisture laden air off the ocean. This year, the monsoons arrived a month earlier than usual, in May instead of June or July. Almost every afternoon for the last month, we have had thunderstorms in the afternoon.
A good portion of the land-shaping forces in the Colorado Piedmont are monsoons. Much of the land between Denver and Colorado Springs, Palmer's Divide, was sculpted by an apocalyptic volcanic explosion followed by an equally apocalyptic flood driven by tropical monsoons. We'll be looking at that in a few weeks when I check out The Bluffs.
The word monsoon derives from the Arabic word mawsim, which denote "season" and it's applied to a seasonal shift in wind patterns. Differential heating during the warm summer months reverse wind directions, bringing warm, moist air from the oceans south of Colorado. The heat also causes updrafts which push the moisture up to form thunderstorms. The brief, sometimes intense, sometimes hail and lightening laden storms are both a welcomed change from the hot summer days and an unwelcomed source of damaging weather. In addition to precipitation from the air, they occasionally spawn flash floods, often enough that highway and trail signs are common in Colorado cautioning visitors in flood prone areas to climb to higher elevations. That means that, if you're in a vehicle and the water starts rising, you have only a little time to leave your vehicle on the side of the road and start climbing. Too many have died trying to outrun a flashflood in the western United States (For that matter, there are plenty of flood prone areas in the East and many other parts of the world.)
We've only had one devastating hail storm in the Denver area in the ten years that I've lived here. It took out most of the skylights in the Walmarts in the area.
You can tell if a cumulonimbus cloud (thunderhead) is producing hail if you have normal color vision. The cloud will be a dirty green color. Hail forms from tiny ice crystals in the high tops of the clouds. They get caught in the updraft, ride it up higher, and get a new coat of ice until they're too heavy to remain aloft. Then they fall and get caught in another updraft. That repeats. The resulting hail is built up of concentric shells of ice.
Most of the hail in our area is tiny to marble size and is soft, like little snowballs. But they can get big and hard. I've been caught in a few hail storms (they sneak up on you) and was pelted by the regular kinds but I don't want to get hit by one of the rare baseball sized chunks of ice.
Honestly, I face Mother Nature with impunity, but one of these days...
Earth has four components. Earth science looks at the interrelationships of all four. The solid and molten materials beneath us comprise the solid earth or geosphere and geology studies that. The hydrosphere is the water that circulates around and inside the crust. It is the purview of hydrology. The envelope of air is called the atmosphere and is the domain of meteorology. And the living things on the planet comprise the biosphere. You might throw in ice and call it the cryosphere. There are different sciences that look at each but the boundaries are not nearly as sharp as one might think.
The red color in Red Rocks could not have happened before life formed on Earth. It's caused by oxidized iron and required an oxygen rich atmosphere. Oxygen in highly reactive and would have been bound up with other elements early in Earth's history. Only plants, taking carbon dioxide in the atmosphere apart to form energy and body parts and generating free oxygen could give us the oxygen rich atmosphere that we have.
Nature is dynamic. What are your seasons like? Can you explain the seasonal patterns?
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