Clouds over Jakarta

Since my holidays, I haven’t got much time to publish anything on my blog. I’m working on a bigger research paper covering banking security in Indonesia, which unfortunately requires lots of work. Beside that, I’m still heavily occupied with my current projects, thus hardly can find spare time for anything else, such as my blog. I hope to be able to write some security related articles when I clear up my TODO list a bit.

Anyway, I wanted to write about something else. The rainy season is almost over and a heavy rain such as the one yesterday won’t happen to often. I personally love to watch storms, thunders and some other crazy weather conditions. This fascination is not rare as around the world there are number of “tornado hunters”, “storm hunters” and other enthusiasts of extreme weather condition. They even got clubs, web-sites with amazing photos and lots of papers on the science aspects of weather.

Jakarta is an extremely interesting place for everyone interested in extreme weather conditions. The weather here can change rapidly and often turns into very heavy storms or thunderstorms accompanies by heavy winds.

Here is some of the best photos from my collection of most interesting weather conditions from the ending rainy season.

The three photos bellow document one of the most interesting weather conditions that I’ve ever seen in Jakarta. As you can see on the photos below, a massive low-level cloud formed and hanged at a very low altitude leaving clear air pocket below. What I’ve found interesting is the almost uniform altitude of the massive dark-gray clouds for distance around 10km from the center of Jakarta towards the sea, while a clear pocket of air without rain appeared bellow.

It looks very interesting on the photos, but in real it looked simply amazing, especially when the storm became very heavy and clouds got very dark. I’d call it a dooms day effect.

One of the other interesting aspects of weather in Jakarta is the difference in weather conditions depending on the area of Jakarta. You may have crazy storm in Mega Kuningan and not a single drop of rain near Merdeka Palace (only a few kilometers away).

I think this photo is a perfect example of this effect.

As you can see we got a heavy rain above Kota, Merdeka Palace and nice sunset over Sudirman, Kuningan, Kemang. One more photo:

The most impressive weather condition I’ve ever seen in Jakarta happened two years ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a digital camera with me thus I could shoot some photos only with my mobile phone. Just take a look at this:

Believe it or not, these photos were taken around 3:30pm. Normally, at 3:30pm we got a bright shiny day here, but that time it was almost dark.

Heavy rains in Jakarta certainly bring floods, creates massive traffic jams and cause lots of problems. However, beside these negative aspects, it's just interesting to see this amazing power of nature. I think heavy storms just remind us that we are not so powerful when it comes to the weather and that we should respect the environment.