Good weather

[hatam_soferet]

livredor and I went touristing on Sunday, to the Brooklyn Bridge. First we had EXTREME PIZZA in the East Village, and then we went over into Brooklyn (via 14th St to see the moving platforms) so as to walk back over the bridge towards Manhattan.

Weather.com had told us that there would be Isolated T-Storms (I insist upon interpreting this as "isolated tea storms," because it pleases me), and standing in the sunshine at the Brooklyn end of the bridge, we could see an Isolated Tea Storm over Manhattan.

Liv observed that it's obvious why the Dutch liked Manhattan; the sky had that curious opaque grey with funny pearly-yellow clouds look to it that you see in Dutch paintings.

Walking over the bridge towards the storm, we saw a huge streak of lightning fizzle out of the clouds and ground itself in the lightning conductor on the American International Building. That's the Empire State Building in the picture, so it was like that except a bit further south. Anyway, the American International Building is the tallest building in Lower Manhattan, so you would sort of expect lightning to ground there, but I've never actually seen actual lightning actually sparking into an actual lightning conductor before. It was very exciting.

Mostly it wasn't raining on us, either. We were on the bridge between Brooklyn which was doing just fine and Manhattan which now had proper lowering clouds absolutely filled with sheets of lightning periodically grounding itself in any tall building that happened to be handy, watching the storm (you can see a lot of sky, from the bridge), not getting wet, and having occasional bouts of engineering lust at how pretty the bridge is.

I had the Umbrella of Utter Happiness with me so when it started actually raining we were okay. The Umbrella of Utter Happiness is concentric fuschia and marigold stripes with radial blend, and I love it to bits. (It is from the guy with a stall at 73rd and Broadway, if you're interested.) It wasn't much use against the Total Tropical Downpour, but happily we were basically in the subway by that time.

Comments

[jillt]

Wow! I love your graphic description! What an experience.

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[(Anonymous)]

I live on the Gulf coast, and a couple of years ago, dirivng from Beaumont to Houston I saw green lightning. It was a dark lime green flash that happened only once, in a rainstorm to the south of me toward the ocean. It was a huge flash that seemed to originate in the upper parts of the clouds and spread out at or near the ground. I thought it was a meteor, but there was no mention of it anywhere in the news. It looked eerily like the image in Independence Day when the White House was blown up, but this was long before that film. It freaked me. I must\'ve told 50 people about it, and no one had ever heard of green lightning, except for one Continental pilot that I met. He told me that it\'s seen, rarely, while flying, and I recall he said it\'s an unusual confluence of solar wind, magnetic field, and charges between clouds that will cause it, similar to the Aurora Borealis.