Video: Cool Thunderstorms Last Week, Northwest Vermont

A developing thunderstorm begins to produce rain
as it intensified last Tuesday near St. Albans, Vermont. 

Last week, I talked about some backward moving thunderstorms in Vermont, thanks to an out of season offshore nor'easter.  

We were on the outskirts of its circulation. We were outside the storm's main cloud shield. Which meant the sun could interact with relatively high humidity last Tuesday to create some scattered thunderstorms. 

The video I finally put together shows the rapid development of what was initially an isolated thunderstorm that formed near the borders of St. Albans, Sheldon and Highgate. 

The first views in the video were taken from Fairfield, east of  St. Albans, but later, around the 1:14 mark in the video I repositioned on St. Albans Hill, where I had a great view of the downpour and storm structure. 

The storm moved southwestward, the opposite of the usual path for Vermont thunderstorms. It 's neat to see in the video that the storm developed a nice rain shaft. It was almost indiscernible at first, as it started wit almost not rain, but then turned into a gushing downpour as the storm moved over parts of St. Albans.  The storm the began to dissipate as it moved over Lake Champlain.

A picturesque gush of rain pours from an isolated thunderstorm
last Tuesday in St. Albans, Vermont. 

Hot on the heels of that storm was a larger, stronger storm.   Starting at the 1:42 mark, you can see me turning my attention away from the first storm and focusing on the larger storm coming in from the Northeast.

I rushed home, and enjoyed the show of the second storm from my shed. Nothing extreme, really, about the storm. However, I don't know about you, but I just enjoy the kind of gusty downpour (with small hail) that I caught in the video.  

Too bad the sound quality isn't great. The thunder wasn't loud, really, but it was absolutely continuous. That's because there were pretty much no cloud to ground strikes. The instability in the air wasn't strong enough to support that. Instead, all the lightning was up in the clouds. 

Click on the image below to view the video.  If you like nice summer thunderstorms this is for you.  On some devices, you might not see the image below that I'm talking about. In that case, click on this link to watch the YouTube video.