Summer Monsoon
Living in the desert Southwest teaches you one lesson fast: everyone starts watching the sky as monsoon season approaches. Months can pass without a single drop of rain, so the first rumble of thunder feels like a promise. If you come from somewhere else, you might picture monsoons as pure chaos—walls of water, washed-out roads, and wild winds. Here, though, monsoon season brings the desert back to life. Seasonal winds sweep in from the southwest, pulling moisture north from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Add blistering 110-degree afternoons, and the atmosphere finally shifts. Clouds build, thunderheads rise, and long-awaited rain rolls across the desert.
Monsoon Drama
In the late afternoon and evening, the storms march across the desert with dramatic flair. Thunder cracks, lightning splits the sky, and rain hammers the ground in sudden, heavy bursts. A single storm can drop more than an inch of water in just 10 to 20 minutes, turning roads slick and low washes into fast-moving streams. But the wide-open desert also gives you a front-row seat to the show. You can watch distant storms build, flash, and sweep across the horizon long before they reach you.
Getting started
About 20 years ago, a good friend introduced Pete to lightning photography—and he never looked back. Ever since that first spark of inspiration, he has chased monsoon storms, tracked flashes across the desert sky, and built a photo library packed with hundreds of lightning shots. Local news channels have featured his work, Arizona Highways has shared it on Facebook, and Popular Science used his lightning shot. One of Pete’s lightning photos even made its way into the Library of Congress! (Library of Congress article)
Lightning is very dangerous
Let’s be clear: lightning photography carries real danger, and no one should treat it like a casual hobby. Pete takes safety seriously, plans carefully, and never puts himself in obvious danger—but storms still know how to surprise even experienced photographers. Once, while he aimed his camera at a distant storm, another storm snuck up behind him and made its entrance with a lightning bolt that slammed into the ground about 100 yards away. That was far too close for comfort. Pete packed his gear fast and headed home. Never trust a storm to stay where you last saw it!
Lightning Facts
– An actual lightning strike travels around 270,000 mph
– Lightning is one of nature’s most recurrent and common spectacles
– For example, round the world, there are over 3,000,000 flashes every day, about 44 strikes every second.
– The actual width of a lightning bolt is only about 2-3 cm. The charge carried down this small channel is so intense that the temperature of the lightning reaches 54,000 °F. that’s five times hotter than the surface of the Sun and 300 million volts
– The average length of a lightning bolt is about 2-3 miles
– To tell how far away a thunderstorm is, simply count the number of seconds between the flash of lightning and the boom of thunder that follows. Divide this number by five and this tells you how many miles away you are from the storm.
Thanks for stopping by. Until next time,
Love, Romin, Pete & Lori
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