I have always liked thunderstorms. They make one feel alive and grateful. There is something profoundly exhilarating about them, but they are also quite dangerous. In the Southwest, where I grew up and lived most of my life, summer monsoons would start with a gust of wind, often followed by a layer of blowing dust and then a cloudburst, a toad strangler, which could often kill at a distance through flash floods. The commonest ways to die in the desert is by either thirst or drowning! But the latter is far more likely than the former! See: www.worldatlas.com/... Rattlesnake bite doesn’t even come close!
Actually, I grew up in Yuma County, a very dry part of North America, with less than three inches of rainfall a year. We were ecstatic if rain fell and there would be a banner headline in The Yuma Daily Sun if a snowflake fell! Then I moved to Tucson to attend the University of Arizona. I soon became enamored of the majestic cumulonimbus clouds (thunderheads) that arose during the summer monsoons. The smell of the desert after a rain was fabulous- creosote and other desert plants perfumed the air with delicate and stronger scents that would enliven any day.
Still, rain storms in the Southwest could be dangerous. Drainage in Tucson was notoriously inadequate and one underpass was apparently called Lake Alice because a woman drove a car into it and drowned because she could not see the water. Streets could become torrents in minutes. But I reveled in driving over a pass in the mountains to see a gigantic thunderstorm ahead of me, for soon would come the life-giving moisture that the desert needed to bloom.
Rain storm over the Chiricahua Mountains, Arizona.
When I moved to Florida in 1973 I quickly found similarly violent storms. Actually I broke down on the freeway in New Orleans as a storm on the edge of Tropical Storm Delia brought a downpour to the area. Luckily I was able to get my Rambler station wagon started again and made it across Lake Pontchartrain before the main storm swerved away from New Orleans and finally hit Texas.
I had a bicycle as well as a car and on at least one occasion while biking to the University of Florida campus, I got caught in a downpour that soaked me to the skin. One surprised me in Naples after I had visited Collier Seminole State Park and I had to wade to my motel room. After I married, I ran into rain storms again and again. I still found thunderstorms exciting, but I respected their power!
In 1978, as money ran out for my postdoc, I got another at New Mexico State University. I was initially stationed in Hobbs, New Mexico, on the edge of the Permian Basin where it meets the llano Estacado or staked plains. This part of New Mexico occasionally records tornados during the summer, but I did not experience even a tornado alert while I was there that summer. Still I did run into violent thunderstorms,especially after I was reassigned to Las Cruces and joined a project in the north during the summer. At one time I drove into a downpour as I reached Springer, which in just a few minutes filled the streets with water over shoe top level!
Back in Florida in 1981-82, I got a chance to go to Puerto Rico twice, where I experienced tropical rains that began suddenly, usually near sundown, heralded by the calls of the tiny coquis (tree frogs). Also one of my colleagues and I hiked a trail at El Yunque where rain fell periodically and water falling was constantly in earshot — a true rainforest.
I left Florida in late 1982- the money had run out- and went back to New Mexico. There I experienced the worst hail storm of my life with all of our mulberry trees being completely stripped of their leaves and my wife having to retreat to the hallway to avoid a possible window break. I was at the university, hoping that our large windows at the building I was in would not break and watching people scurry for the doors from the parking lot. Fortunately our windows held both at the university and at our house and our roof was saved by the tree leaves. Many other people in Las Cruces fared much worse than we did. A tornado was in the storm, but dissipated before it hit the Rio Grande Valley from the west.
Thunderhead, Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Rainbow over Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
When I returned to Lea County during several experimental projects I heard two tornado alerts on my truck radio. I had never heard such earlier, but I still never saw the storms. I did hear a severe hail warning for Roswell when I was driving there from our experimental sites, but by the time I got there it was all over and the hail had mostly melted.
Also I ran into a torrential downpour returning from a research site in eastern New Mexico just as I was entering the Sacramento Mountains. The rain pelted down like a waterfall and the cliffs imitated Niagara Falls. I had no place to turn out and had to continue on, just hoping that a cliff would not collapse on me. In addition I had to deal with some traffic! I made it, but breathed a very large sigh of relief as I pulled into Cloudcroft!
After many thunderstorms during 1983-2015, we left New Mexico to join one daughter (another followed) to the Western part of the state of Washington, where, thunderstorms are rare and the rains usually relatively gentle. I do miss the hugh thunderheads, but in recent times I have seen them and heard thunder a bit more often here than I had a few years ago. Maybe ….
Thunderheads developing over Puget Sound, Washington.