"So we're getting really hot air accumulating in that area, but we also have a humid sea breeze that comes in every afternoon. During the build-up, Pippard explains, strong south-easterly winds blow across northern Australia from the desert. Unlike other tropical regions, the Top End also has geography on its side. "Something as weak as a sea breeze can actually create enough of a little bit of push to grab that air to a level where it will start to rise by itself." "Something special about the tropics, which isn't really true for southern Australia, is that there is so much moisture and instability that the lift doesn't have to be nearly as strong as it does in other parts of Australia," Pippard says. The goal is to see some of these bolts for ourselves, but he warns that the movement of tropical storms is notoriously difficult to predict. One afternoon during the build-up, the period of high temperatures and unbearable humidity that precedes the monsoon, O'Neill offers to take us out on a chase. "I just wanted to understand why it's doing what it's doing." "These clean air strokes, always happen first, nine times out of ten," O'Neill says. The bolt covered a horizontal distance longer than the space between Melbourne and Adelaide. Alongside a collaborator in the United States, O'Neill is currently researching "bolts from the blue" - lightning strokes that exit the side of a cloud and can hit the ground many kilometres away from the storm itself.Įarlier this year, the World Meteorological Organisation declared a 768-kilometre lightning flash in the United States the world record holder for distance travelled. "So I bought a little Sony point-and-shoot and was in the backyard trying to get photos, and it wasn't happening - I had no idea."īut recently, the chase has been about more than the perfect shot. "It was his lightning shots that were the thing that sort of tweaked me," he says. O'Neill's interest in thunderstorms began in 2002, when he was gifted a coffee table book by famed Australian landscape photographer Peter Jarver.
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