Weather Timelapse: Lenticular Clouds in the Eastern Sierra

A few nights ago I watched lenticular clouds form over the Three Sisters in the Sweetwater Range, across Topaz Lake on the California/Nevada border in the Eastern Sierra. It looked like a little sunset light might get through, so I took a few photographs, and set up my camera to capture a time-lapse sequence of several hundred more, so I could convert them into a video.

As the direct sunlight left the scene and the light faded towards the blue light of twilight, is looked like the cloud cover was too thick, and sunset simply wasn't going to happen.

Then a hint of orange started to appear, and brighten, at the bottom of the stack of clouds.



I reframed the image to capture detail of the evolving light over the Three Sisters.

The sunset light was brief, but intense, and the roughly 1000 photos that I took to capture the moment payed off!

I processed a few hundred of the images into a time-lapse video so you could see the whole event.  Here's the best edit I've produced so far:

Storm Clouds Over The Mono Basin

Storm Clouds Over Mono Craters, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

On this afternoon I was eager to head over Tioga Pass to Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park, but as I drove north from Bishop in the Eastern Sierra and entered the Mon Basin, there were some nice storm clouds building over Mono Lake. That's too nice of a photo opportunity to pass up, so I turned on highwya 120 towards Mono Lake's South Tufa access.

When I arrived at the South Tufa turnoff, it was clear that the majority of the clouds were well East of the South Tufa site, so I took a right fork in the dirt road to head out to Navy Beach, where I could place sand tufa formations in the foreground of my shots.
After taking a variety of shots I resumed my course towards Yosemite, but upon reaching the highway 395/120 intersection just South of the town of Lee Vining, a rainbow appeared over Mono Lake. If I could reach the Old Marina access point just north of town, I could adjust my position to place the rainbow over the tufa offshore there, and zoom in to get a ncie composition and to make the rainbow major elements in the photo. The rainbow came and went for a few moments, and then was gone. Fortunately I had arrived just in time to capture a frame or two with the image that I had anticipated.

Sierra Spring Storm at Mono Lake

I accidentally woke up around 4:30am, so it was easy to drive the rest of the way here in time for a very early dawn. There was new snow on the ground down by June Lakes, but it hadn't stuck to the road so driving wassn't an issue. At the South Tufa access to Mono Lake, nothing to speak of happened at sunrise, it was very gray and featureless, but then the storm started to break...

Mount Dana, at over 13,000 feet, always makes a nice subject to contrast with the exotic limestone tufa towers at Mono Lake.

This grass is green in the Mono Basin for only a few weeks. What a nice contrast to have the fresh snow on the peaks in the distance! The roads towards the right side provide a nice sense of the scale here (click on these photos to view larger copies).

Tioga Pass had just opened, and with the periodic distings of snow over the past few days, the vernal pools in Tuolumne Meadows contained plenty of water.