Jason Godwin's Weather (and Other Stuff) Blog

For this week's Photo of the Week (actually taken by my dad), I went into the archives again and found a picture of a beautiful sunset. But not just any sunset. This was the sunset the night before Hurricane Katrina's historic landfall on the Louisiana coast. Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005 (when I was a sophomore in high school), bringing catastrophic damage to southeast Louisiana and southern Mississippi, and in particular, in the Greater New Orleans area. This photo was taken from Lafayette, Louisiana (my hometown). The effects in Lafayette were actually fairly minimal, but Lafayette would experience moderate impacts from Hurricane Rita about a month later. I was already interested in weather around this time, but Katrina, along with the rest of the historic 2005 hurricane season, would help solidify my lifelong interest in meteorology.

For this week's featured photo, I went into the archives and found a photo from my days as a graduate student at University of Miami. This photo was taken along the Rickenbacker Causeway which connects Virginia Key and Key Biscayne to the mainland in Miami. I do not recall much that was specific about this thunderstorm from September 19, 2012, just that it was very photogenic. There were a few "appendages" on the bottom of the shelf cloud, but they were most likely scud clouds and probably not funnel clouds. Scattered to numerous thunderstorms occur on a near daily basis across South Florida from April through October. While they are rarely severe, they often produce abundant lightning and torrential rainfall. A few more photos of this thunderstorm can be found below. The top of the storm casts shadows on the higher clouds as the sun sets in the west. Note the sun setting behind the rain shaft. Looking back towards the Rickenbacker Causeway and the main...