Live Beach Cam and Best Dangerous Job

In random but still weather-related news this week, Wired magazine listed "Hurricane Hunter" as one of "The Best Dangerous Science Jobs" this month. Hard to say what they based that on -- most of the jobs listed had death statistics with them, but no one has ever been killed or injured in that vocation.

Moving from vocation to vacation, I've been really lucky to experience at least one thunderstorm each day thus far on my trip. Photos, video shots and radars are forthcoming -- I can hardly keep up with them this week. Again, below are the latest 5 photos; below that is a writeup of what I've seen so far.

LATEST 5 PHOTOS FROM weathermatrix:

Friday 7/28 : We ran through a massive thunderstorm with frequent, close lightning on I-81 in west-central Virginia during mid-afternoon. I am working on compiling radar images and photos/videos of the lightning and heavy rain that I took from the passenger seat of our car.

Saturday 7/29 : Approaching Wilmington, NC, a large severe thunderstorm was dropping 6 inches of rain on the city. Traffic on the 133 to Oak Island slowed to a crawl as frequent lightning flashes and road flooding ensued. It was very intense, perhaps the most intense I've seen this year. The sky was extremely dark for 3 PM and very interesting cloud shelves and rotating eddies, some of which I video taped. Then, after our arrival on Oak Island, the storm caught up with us at the grocery store, with more lightning, and flooded the main beach road, causing us to drive through high water.

Sunday 7/30 : A morning thunderstorm (you have to love those in the South!) began over Southport while I was at a coffeeshop and I took some pictures of some interesting clouds over the Sound on the back of Oak Island on my way back to the south.

Monday 7/30 : An evening thunderstorm clipped western Oak Island. I drove down to the end of the beach to setup my cameras. Shelf and possible wall clouds were observed, along with some lightning.

Tuesday 7/31 : A thunderstorm developed near Wilmington and moved southward over Oak Island. Unfortunately it was dissipating when doing so. I did take a few pictures and tried out the new waterproof video camera by setting it out in the rain. It performed successfully but didn't record anything interesting.

Wednesday looks like it will be sunny but we may return to a chance of storms Thursday or Friday. Thus far the action has been during the day and I have not yet had a much anticipated night storm over the ocean. Here's hoping.

And finally, the J-CAM Beach Cam is live, I think, after much shuffling of furniture to get the laptop closer to the window. As stated before, Verizon access here on the island is bad at best, but for now it seems to be working. Check it out on the left side of my blog on AccuWeather.com or click below: