INTENSE Lightning Storm Broward County 07-16-23

A very INTENSE lightning storm started rolling into Broward County, FL a little after 5 PM on July 16, 2023. I heard the roar of thunder in the distance at that time and checked LightningMaps.Org which revealed a chain of lightning strikes going off in the Everglades west of me. I immediately drove to a nearby location about 10 miles west of the Atlantic and just south of Tamarac and went up to the third floor balcony of a building. I set up my cell camera on a tripod and pointed it almost due west to catch the incoming lightning storm. I recorded the storm with my Samsung Galaxy S20 cell camera set at 60 fps UHD.

The videos you see here were made in a fifteen minute period between about 5:35 and 5:50 PM. For every lightning strike you see there were at least 3 more strikes that were either behind the clouds or out of camera range so probably over 40 nearby lightning strikes during that period. The lightning actually intensified after 5:50 PM but because the strikes were either behind the low clouds or obscured by the very heavy rain that rolled in I was unable to record the lightning strikes after that time.

Due to the high quality of the videos I recorded I am able to show you closeups of the lightning strikes as well as slow them down to 1/4 and 1/16 speeds. The latter speed was quite revealing in that it showed that many of the lightning strikes when first seen as simple solitary strikes were often actually a series of complex strikes.