Originally Posted by
paperHanger
Looking at that video ... and looking at the photo posted at the beginning of the thread, surely no one is suggesting they were taken of the same approach on the same day? The cloud cover, rain, approach angle are completely different. It's solid cover with rain on the video, broken and sunny on the photo .. the sea state is calm ... it would have been somewhat more lively in that storm etc ...
I've got to assume you've never operated in the tropics.
A single tropical Cu - (not Cb, Cu; your basic 5000 x 5000-ft puffball) - can drop a dense rain shaft that is less than a mile thick, yet totally impenetrable to vision. And with 20-kt constant trade winds, can move on 5 miles in 15 minutes.
Living and working in San Juan, just over yonder from TNCM, it was almost a daily afternoon event to go from severe clear and sunny, to the middle of a downpour that cut viz to tens of meters, and back to bright and sunny again, in a period of 10 minutes, as one single cloud decided to cut loose. With rain so heavy that within 15 seconds you might just as well have jumped in the sea - soaked to the nether regions of the underwear. And flooded gutters and streets - localized to a 4-block area.
Not that you can't get longer or wider-spread storms as well. But in the tropics, there is
nothing at all abnormal about the visual difference between those two approaches - not only on the same day, or 45 minutes apart, but even just 15 minutes apart.