Awesome thunderstorm

One of the world’s best aviation photographers Christiaan van Heijst has taken yet another spectacular image of nature at her more awesome – a thunderstorm growing at a staggering 2000m a minute! Christiaan takes up the story; “Flying somewhere between Beijing and Shanghai [on June 14], we encountered a very active weather front with beautiful and very active thunderstorms. The cloud here seen on our left started to appear on our weather radar only a few minutes before and started to show off an amazing display of lightning that grew ever more intense. When we got closer, we saw that the cloud was going to burst through our flight path and we had to deviate up to 10km to avoid flying into this cell. Growing with a speed of up to 5000/6000ft per minute (1.5-2km per minute) straight up into the air, this was certainly a hazard to our airplane if we didn’t fly around her. The beauty of night flights in Asia this time of the year.” And earlier this month Christiaan took another stunning image of the freak weather systems that battered Europe. Again Christiaan takes up the story; “During descent into Luxembourg, we were navigating through a maze of enormous mountains of moist, water and ice.  Recent heavy weather over Europe created some massive, almost un-European, convective clouds that resulted in major thunderstorms and squall lines moving over Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands.” Christiaan uses his front row seat in his 747 to take some truly spectacular images which can be found at his website. It is truly worth a visit!! The weather is only going to get worse Watch this spectacular video of a thunderstorm over Guatemala and South of Mexico. It was taken from a Boeing 767-300 by Noe Castillo of Videos de Aviacion. The thunderstormn action starts at 1.5 minutes in and is amazing. Click here for more videos from Noe Castillon.