One of the reasons I moved to Florida in 1999 was to enjoy the lightning storms. I was living in the mid-Atlantic and had gotten into chasing storms in Tornado Alley two years earlier. I looked into moving to Oklahoma, but career and geography conspired to bring me to Florida. The one thing I didn’t realize was that so few of the lightning storms in the Sunshine State are at night. Most happen during the day. And getting to a storm an hour away in Florida is not nearly as easy as getting to one in Tornado Alley. Why? It’s not just because of the traffic and road network. It’s because Florida storms tend to be short-lived; by the time you hit the road to catch that storm 45 miles away, it’s faded to a misty memory.

This past week was par for the course – and the one night a little lightning hung on after dark on the east coast, where I live, I didn’t get to it until it was nearly gone. But I’ve had a crazy smorgasbord of storms upon which to feast, yielding a nice photo or two almost every day. Florida has amazing striated shelf clouds, formed by cool air pushing out from thunderstorms. And boundary collisions tend to cause quick funnels and tornadoes; I was at a small get-together at a friend’s house when a funnel cloud (not a tornado, because it didn’t connect with the ground, at least that we saw) formed beyond their neighbors’ houses. My camera got soaking wet as I ran out in the rain in my bathing suit to try to shoot photos. What a week!

Meanwhile, I’ve been working late on revisions and editing of “Zap Bang,” the final novel in the Storm Seekers trilogy. I’m thrilled to be wrapping up the story and heartbroken to be leaving these characters. It’s coming very soon!

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A line of storms formed in east-central Florida on July 14, pushing out an outflow boundary that created a beautiful striated shelf cloud.

I shot photos of it over Cocoa Village, in downtown Cocoa, and then raced east to catch it again at the Cocoa Beach Pier.

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Nature paralleled the unnatural on Wednesday, July 9, 2014, when a beautiful striated shelf cloud moved over Cocoa, Florida, the Indian River Lagoon and the bridge over the S.R. 520 Causeway. It originated from a barely-moving severe storm farther west that sent out an outflow boundary. The shelf cloud almost mirrored the curve of the bridge as it went overhead.  This was a “gentle(wo)man’s chase,” just a few miles from home, as I followed the slow-moving line of severe storms.

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I had a chance to see Cocoa, Florida’s July 4th fireworks from a height on Friday and snapped several photos. They were taken looking toward the S.R. 520 bridge over the Indian River Lagoon. Here are a few of the more interesting explosions. Happy summer!

Off and on for a few years, I’ve been trying to perfect a time-lapse of a night-blooming cereus flowering, but it’s a challenge, because each bloom flowers for only one night. Each time I’ve used a different camera and different lighting. I’ve blown out the image with too much light, so this year I used a smaller light. But I had to use a wide-angle waterproof camera because it was raining in our part of central Florida, so sacrifices were made in terms of quality and zoom. You can see the flowers buffeted by the wind as a shower whisks through.

Still, it’s always fascinating to see these beautiful flowers unfold for their one-night-a-year show. Click the gear symbol in the lower left after you hit play and choose 720HD for best quality.

On June 5, 2014, I started my day in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and decided to target southeast Colorado. This would be my last day of chasing in Tornado Alley for this season.

I made a stop in Limon, running into Charles Edwards of Cloud 9 Tours, and evaluated data before committing to the target. The first storm I chased was near the southernmost town in Colorado, Branson.

The severe storms led me into the dramatic topography of northeastern New Mexico and then the Texas Panhandle, when lightning lured me to pause during my all-night drive, as I was starting my trip home to the east coast.

I was especially delighted to get shots of a storm looming over the Route 66 landmark U Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas. The beautiful wee-hours storms were a satisfying way to end a trip of meager setups and an insane amount of driving.

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On June 1, 2014, I met up with fellow chasers Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland, Anemometer Steve Barabas, and The Weather Network’s Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal and Michel Millaire.

We faced a bunch of ongoing convection, including a morning storm over Sidney, Nebraska, where we’d spent the night, and knew the forecast would be messy. We chased storms in northwest Kansas, but they had trouble remaining isolated and maintaining their strength.

Still, the skies were sometimes spectacular, and I got a few photos that made me happy.

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On May 26, 2014, Peggy Willenberg and I hopped east to Stanton, Texas, from our starting point in Midland to keep an eye on developing storms.

We ran into friends there, including Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland, Robert Balogh, John Mann, Anemometer Steve Barabas, and The Weather Network’s Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal and Michel Millaire, whom we met on and off all day.

What a swoosh in this storm!

We targeted a storm to the northwest and chased it for a while, then switched to a storm developing behind it. It was a day of stunning structure and rotating features, some of them dusty, and while many of these spinups were reported as tornadoes, we didn’t see any tornado I’d hang on the wall of fame.

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It’s hard to keep up with the web while on the road, but today was my fourth day chasing storms in Tornado Alley. Peggy Willenberg of the Twister Sisters and I have been traveling since Saturday from the east coast, and we saw some beautiful storms in the northern Plains earlier this week.

Catch up on all the chases on my 2014 storm reports page on SkyDiary.com. More updates are in the works. You can see where I am during active storm chases on the map on the tracking page. And please follow me on Twitter for the latest!

 
On May 21, 2014, Peggy Willenberg and I moved southwest from our starting point in Sterling, Colorado, to get into position in front of a cell coming out of the Denver area, where a brief tornado was reported near the airport. (There were many tornadoes reported today, but this is the only one that’s yielded convincing video that I’ve seen so far.)

We got in front of the storm north of Bennett and watched it make a serious effort at organizing as it spun.

We followed it east, watching the rotation and staying ahead of the hail. It was a beautiful storm, especially with the green light that suggested how much hail it held.

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