Thunderstorms can be incredibly photogenic. Often if you see beautiful fluffy clouds in the sky spreading far and wide, you can expect showers, usually of a short duration, but with abrupt and heavy bursts of rain, sleet, snow and/or hail.

That isn’t always a given though, so the best way of recognising a raincloud is to understand their anatomy and to keep an eye on how they’re moving. However, as they can be kilometres in width and height, they can seem slow-moving or static from our perspective even when travelling at great speeds.

A timelapse (a short one even) such as the one above can help predict an incoming rain shower combined with radar images.