As I stepped out of my front door into the pre-dawn darkness
from my home near Ann Arbor, Michigan yesterday morning, I
braced myself for the cold shock of a mid-March morning. It
didn't come. A warm, murky atmosphere, with temperatures in the
upper fifties--30 degrees above normal--greeted me instead.
Continuous flashes of heat lightning lit up the horizon, as the
atmosphere crackled with the energy of distant thunderstorms.
Beware the Ides of March, the air seemed to be saying. I looked
up at the hazy stars above me, flashing in and out of sight as
lightning lit up the sky, and thought, this is not the
atmosphere I grew up with. Video 1. Video taped at Hudson Mills
Metro Park in Dexter about 5:30PM on March 15, 2012, by Matthew
Altruda from Tree Town Sound, http://www.treetownsound.com.
Caution: foul language. That afternoon, as the Detroit
temperature soared to 77°F, the second warmest on record so
early in the year, going back to 1871, I watched as late
afternoon thunderstorms built with remarkable speed.