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This is the incredible moment a storm is caught suddenly dumped tonnes of water into an Alpine lake.

Amateur filmmaker Peter Maier, 27, caught the weather phenomenon known as a wet microburst in a timelapse video while staying at Lake Millstatt in Austria.

The 27 year old, who works as a fitter in the energy industry in the city of Basel, Switzerland, described the storm as being like a 'tsunami from heaven'.

After posting the video on Facebook, he said: 'One can't plan on capturing such images. It was a lucky shot.'

Mr Maier's incredible video quickly went viral, attracting 1.4 million views and more than 25,000 shares.

One commenter said it looked 'as if someone had poured a bucket of water up there'. Some viewers were so taken aback they thought the video must have been a fake, which prompted Mr Maier to post the original version.


An avid mountaineer, Mr Maier always carries five or six cameras in his backpack to capture the wonders of the natural world on camera.


A microburst is an intense small-scale downdraft produced by a thunderstorm or rain shower. There are two types of microbursts - wet microbursts and dry microbursts.


Several fatal and historic air crashes have been attributed to the phenomenon and flight crew training now goes to great lengths on how to recover from microbursts.

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