Monsoon II: Mike Olbinski’s Arizona Storm Time-Lapse of the 2015 Season

Shelf clouds rolling over the desert, rain shafts hanging from towering cells, walls of blowing dust and lightning almost everywhere you look. Monsoon II, Arizona photographer Mike Olbinski’s time-lapse of the 2015 storm season, compresses an entire summer of Southwestern weather into a few minutes of film.

Monsoon II by the numbers

Olbinski released the film in early October 2015, and his notes on the project show the scale of the work. He spent 48 days chasing storms that monsoon season, up from roughly 31 the year before, and drove about 17,000 miles. He shot some 105,000 time-lapse frames, and around 55,000 of them made the final cut. The soundtrack is “Palladio (Rebuilt)” by composer Kerry Muzzey, who donated the music; Olbinski looped the 6:15 track into an 8:30 piece to fit the footage.

Most of the film was shot in Arizona. Olbinski mentions storms around Cottonwood, where a brief mesocyclone formed over the town in a sequence he counts among his all-time favourites, and the closing scene was filmed west of Tonopah. The season also delivered several mini-supercells, the compact rotating storms that give monsoon chasers their most dramatic structure.

Watch it on YouTube: Monsoon II by Mike Olbinski.

What is the North American monsoon?

The word monsoon means a seasonal shift in winds, and the North American version is a summer pattern over Mexico and the US Southwest. Intense daytime heating builds a thermal low over the Mexican Plateau and the desert. That circulation pulls low-level moisture north from the Gulf of California and the eastern Pacific, while easterly winds aloft bring more moisture from the Gulf of Mexico.

The season usually runs from June to mid-September. Storms reach New Mexico and south-east Arizona in early July and the pattern matures by mid-July. For much of the region it is the main event of the year: many areas of north-west Mexico and the Southwest receive more than half their annual precipitation from the monsoon, and Tucson’s normal monsoon rainfall is 6.06 inches (154 mm).

How storm time-lapses are made

A time-lapse is a series of still photographs taken at fixed intervals and played back as video. A storm that grows over twenty minutes can unfold in seconds, which reveals motion the eye barely notices in real time: the rotation in a mesocyclone, the boiling tops of rising cells, the steady march of a shelf cloud. Each sequence takes hundreds of frames, which is why 105,000 photos produce a film of only a few minutes. Olbinski built his edit around the music, opening with growing clouds and saving the most intense sequences for later in the film.

Monsoon storm safety

Enjoy the drama from a safe place: flash flooding is one of the biggest monsoon dangers, and dry desert washes can fill suddenly even when no storm is visible nearby, while lightning strikes are a significant threat across open terrain. Storm chasers like Olbinski work with forecasts, local knowledge and an escape route for every shot.

For a quieter use of the same film technique, see Martin Heck’s Dolomites time-lapse. For a naturally striking cloud scene at a single place, explore the Grand Canyon cloud inversion.

Related reading

• Catatumbo Lightning: Lake Maracaibo’s Repeated Thunderstorms
• Twenty Thunderstorm Photographs: Light, Scale and Changing Skies
• Craig Shimala’s Chicago Lightning Recordings
• Scott Sheppard’s Lightning Incident Near Fairburn
• Seven Lightning Photographs: Landmarks, Volcanoes and Exposure
• A Cloud-to-Ground Lightning Strike Near Darwin

Sources