Severe Thunderstorm on the Outer Banks

Sunday evening I had the pleasure of witnessing a severe thunderstorm passing over my location at the Outer Banks. AccuWeather.com RadarPlus alerted me to the storm via text messages and maps which showed the lightning strikes approaching.

As you can see by the radar image above, it was on a perfect track to reach me at the beach house (I am at the "x"). I setup my camera outside of our condo and got a few good shots of the massive cloud approaching from the west, dropping lightning underneath. As the lightning swung out to the south, I moved the camera and tripod out to my car. Then came the fun part. Heavy rain hit, with extremely high winds and marble-sized hail. The SUV rocked back and forth as blowing sand and rain reduced visibility to 50 feet. It was probably the most intense storm I have experienced in my SUV (purchased 5 years ago).

When I got home, I looked up the Duck Pier wind data. As you can see from the graph above, the station gusted to 31.4 m/s, or 69 mph! Shortly after the rain and wind tapered off, I was treated to some excellent lightning shots facing south as the storm moved away. Here is the best one:

Later this week I'll expand this blog entry to include additional photos.