May 14th Fog Tsunami

The week of May 12th the weather really took us on a roller coaster ride. Starting the week with mild temps and fog on the lake, wednesday was the first day that I got to experience a wild weather phenomenon. It was sunny at my house and the wind was low, so I had figured it would be a good day to take the boat down to the marina to get some gas before the holiday weekend. When I got down there, the lake was totally covered in a dense fog (which I later found out was called a Marine layer)! We decided to go out on the lake anyways, which we quickly decided wasn’t fun due to the thick cold fog. It was approximately 70 degrees 1 mile inland where we had started, and 50 degrees on the lake. When we were riding back to the slip, I noticed some pretty impressive clouds forming off to the South.

To get a better look at the clouds, I launched my drone from my house and saw an incredible thunderhead (cumulonimbus cloud) growing at a pretty remarkable pace. I always love watching this process, so I started a Hyperlapse (time lapse video). This video below is 25 minutes of time compressed down into 10 seconds. An image is taken every second for the full 25 minutes which yields a 30 second video. I then compressed that further into a 10 second video which gave me the following video.

When the time lapse concluded, I was looking around the horizon with the drone for a wall cloud below the storm, and I noticed something quite strange around the lake under the storm cloud. I noticed it and zoomed in with the drone and took the following photo:

The marine layer of air (boundary layer between water and air) was still foggy from earlier and was absolutely fascinating. I noticed that it was pretty quickly moving north, so I started filming a time lapse. Unfortunately the drone battery was almost already spent from filming the cloud time lapse previously post. Here is the time lapse I got.

When I took this video I had no idea that 24 hours later it would be all over the news nationally! This clip spread far and wide across the internet and was featured on more sites that I could count. It was probably one of the coolest things I have seen in my years of photography (I feel like i say that pretty frequently, but here we are). Once I get the list of places it was shared, I will post it on this blog. Here is some additional photos of the event that I captured:

I hope you all enjoyed my photos and videos created from this. I really look forward to sharing more of these events with you in the future and starting to make blog posts a more regular occurrence! CNN was able to create a cool graphic that explained how this formation formed. I have included that link here as well:

News outlets that purchased the video include the following

The Sun
IFLScience
The Weather Company - An IBM Business - Weather.com
OTV
Fox TV (Local Stations)
The Weather Channel TV Network - Entertainment Studios
Associated Newspapers
AccuWeather
ABC News
Fox News Channel
New York Post

For those interested in the monetary compensation with a viral video like this, The net revenue obtained by the viral media company was approximately $1600. From what I gleaned from my agreement I should be able to get approximately half of that. pretty good payday for a 10 minute drone flight!