Tuesday evening Leah and I noticed some dramatic clouds in the sky in two different places. I saw a yellow glow from the rear of the house and went outside on the deck to look. Off to the left, which is roughly east, I saw a cloud that was illuminated by the setting sun. It showed some fair vertical development.

At the same time Leah was in the front. She called me out there and pointed to a cloud formation directly behind the house that I couldn’t see from the deck because of the trees. This was pretty much due south of us. It also showed some vertical development to the right in this image.

Here is a panorama I shot with our little Nikon S9700, which has a built-in panorama function.

It looked like there was some rain beneath the cloud to the east, but it was late enough that it was hard to tell. A little later, after the sun had set completely, I went out onto the deck and saw this.

This was not a severe thunderstorm, so the lightning strokes were infrequent. I edited the video to get several strokes into a short period.

This was what my phone’s weather radar app showed at the same time. The red pushpin is our location.

You can see that both cloud formations were producing rain, although not heavy rain.

You can see in the first two images that there was no anvil formation on either cloud, so they were not exceptionally high. I tried to do some rough calculations of the height of the cloud to the east, which was just south of downtown Rome. I had to estimate its distance and the elevation angle to the top of the cloud. I figure that the cloud top was somewhere between 14,000 and 19,000 feet. That sounds reasonable for the early development stages of a not-particularly severe thunderstorm.