Topic: Thunderstorm question.

[Skywatch]

We've had some good thunderstorms within the past week for the Dallas fort-worth area. But one rare thing I've personally never seen in real life but have seen on the news and in photos is where a storm is so thick and intence that the sky is blackend. Not dark blue but nighttime black in the middle of the day. Just wanted to know if anyones ever experienced this?

[Bunty]

I can remember it getting eerily kinda close to dark outside during one tornado warning, but the clouds weren't black.

[Maumelle Weather]

I vividly remember back in the spring of 1983, sitting in my 9th grade Honors English class it got black as the Ace of Spades with a tinge of green and purple outside at around 2:30p.m. It was so dark that all of the streetlights came on.  If one had not known better, you would have thought it was midnight. Needless to say, we ended up in the basement of the school for about an hour.

John

[mackbig]

I have seen it pretty dark before... but see the words I bolded below.
It will always look darker in pictures unless the camera settings are perfect.  And even then its not normally as "real" as the human eye.   Add a flash, or the light on a video camera that illuminates the reporters face, and darkish low light backgrounds becomes pitch black pretty quick.

Andrew

But one rare thing I've personally never seen in real life but have seen on the news and in photos is where a storm is so thick and intence that the sky is blackend. Not dark blue but nighttime black in the middle of the day. Just wanted to know if anyones ever experienced this?

[Skywatch]

I have seen it pretty dark before... but see the words I bolded below.
It will always look darker in pictures unless the camera settings are perfect.  And even then its not normally as "real" as the human eye.   Add a flash, or the light on a video camera that illuminates the reporters face, and darkish low light backgrounds becomes pitch black pretty quick.

Andrew

But one rare thing I've personally never seen in real life but have seen on the news and in photos is where a storm is so thick and intence that the sky is blackend. Not dark blue but nighttime black in the middle of the day. Just wanted to know if anyones ever experienced this?

The one storm I was talking about happened back in 2001 and slipped my mind. But I'm used to the news stations getting footage of storms. However the one storm I'm talking about was like nothing I've ever seen before. And the storm activity we had the other day. The hail that came down in that storm was the most intense I've ever seen it in the years I've lived in Texas. It gets me thinking.

[ocala]

A few years back I had one of those. I remember because it was about 12PM in the summertime and it was like night time. I also recorded the highest rainrate ever on my VP2. A whopping 17.50. I swear it sounded like someone was playing drums on my roof. 

[Downlinerz2]

    I have not seen any really black conditions before. It has gotten pretty dark and I too have seen green or tourqois before but not black. 

[mackbig]

I remember it getting pretty black once when I was about 4 or 5.  We were heading to the cottage, Friday afternoon around 4pm.  Got really dark and torrented for quite sometime, all 4 lanes of the highway just stopped dead for 10-15 minutes.

Parents were recalling the story a few years ago, and added that the preceding week a televangelist in the States had forecast the world to end.  That "date" happened to be the afternoon we were heading up north. So when they came over the hill just before Holland Marsh and they saw it coming, they were starting to freak out a bit that this guy might have been on to something....      As it ended up, the end of the world just added a half hour to our cottage commute.

Andrew

[tobol.7uno]

Happens almost every afternoon here in Florida! Not uncommon, depends on the angle of the sun and the thickness of the cloud.

[oversee]

I have seen this once or twice in California. It is eerie.
When you see it on the news or in photos it might look blacker than it really was because of the way the camera works. If the foreground is lit up, the background will always look darker than it really is.

[IMADreamer]

I have seen this many times in my life.  It's pretty common with late morning MCSs coming through here every summer.  It's eery and awesome at the same time.