Sky Diary: the blog

Even when you set aside a month in which your window for chasing storms seems flexible and endless, you can miss stuff, and boy, did we miss stuff the week before we headed to the Plains for the 2024 chase. It didn’t help that I had work obligations and my chase co-pilot Alethea Kontis made a whirlwind trip to South Korea. And thus we missed a week of epic tornadoes. But May 6 looked promising, so we headed out from Florida to catch the action — even if it looked like the action would die off soon afterward.

I’m writing this later, so I can say we totally redeemed the season as we extended our trip into a third week. But there were ups and downs, and it all started with an ominous forecast on May 6 for Oklahoma. As the Storm Prediction Center summarized its “high risk” outlook, “A regional outbreak of severe weather with multiple intense (EF3+), long-tracked tornadoes, as well as very large hail and severe thunderstorm gusts, is expected over parts of the south-central Plains from this afternoon through evening.”

They weren’t exactly wrong. There were tornadoes, including one before dark, wrapped in rain, that some storm chasers saw. But most of the tornadoes were after dark, including a terrible one in the Bartlesville area. Yet this wasn’t a day of many rampaging tornadoes, fortunately for Oklahoma, and we didn’t see one.

 

That doesn’t mean we weren’t concerned about the day as it began, as you can see in the video. But instead of a high-stress chase, what we got was classic rotating storms forming on the dryline in the Texas Panhandle and pushing into Oklahoma. They weren’t moving all that fast, and we had a satisfying chase as we observed pretty convection and tried to pick the right cell. And after dark, we were treated to a beautiful lightning show.

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I keep hearing blogs are dead, unless they’re so full of searchable content that they’re not. Mine has been quiet for a while, and there are reasons for that.

While I occasionally opine about writing and I love to share my photos, I mostly use the Sky Diary blog as a kind of archive so I can remember and relive my storm chases over the years. But real life often gets in the way of my record-keeping. I still have a bunch of old files on my legacy storm-chasing site that haven’t migrated over here yet. And 2023 – well, I managed to post just one of my Tornado Alley chases with Alethea Kontis from last year DURING last year.

 

Part of the issue is that when you’re chasing, you’re driving. And driving. And driving. And maybe eating subpar snacks and forecasting a little. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a few hours of sleep after dumping all my photo cards each night and backing everything up. It takes forever. And when I get home, I have to catch up with reality all over again.

So on the eve of chasing storms in 2024 — after missing a historic outbreak — I thought it might be time to catch up on my storm reports a bit. I’ll be posting a few fantastic 2023 chases under 2023 in the blog sequence (backdating them). Feel free to browse and see what you might find. The first one is up: a dazzling lightning-producing storm in New Mexico on May 25, 2023.

What have I been doing, if I’m so slow to post my chase photos? One, I have a day job editing books and creating book covers. Two, I’ve thrown almost all of my “extra” energy into writing new mysteries under my pen name and trying to grow the audience for those. Three, hubby and I are occasionally traveling now that the worst of the pandemic is over, and four, I have family obligations that take a bite out of my schedule.

And we have crazy dogs. Did I mention dogs?

Storm chasing has been a long and twisty road. It’s changed. So have I. As life gets more complicated, why do I keep doing it?

Perspective after almost three decades of chasing

I remember a time when I dreamed of integrating storm chasing into every part of my life, of being in the inner circle, of “making the grade” and earning some kind of gold star of recognition. I felt like I had something to prove, I guess. I haven’t fully achieved any of those things, for good reasons, it turns out, one of them being that sometimes those shiny things are worth less than you think.

But I chase. And storms did work their way into much of my life, elevating my photography and inspiring my Storm Seekers Series of novels. Storm chasing is a huge part of my identity still.

Back when I got hooked on chasing, I applied for jobs in Tornado Alley, which would have been a big move for me as a lifetime East Coaster. In the end, I compromised and took a job in Florida, figuring at least there’d be lightning storms. But I still had a “real job” in newspapers, and I wasn’t willing to make the sacrifices some chasers make — going into significant debt, living in their cars. I mean, I am IMPRESSED by that dedication. I just don’t have the constitution to endure the hardships. And there’s so much life to taste, to quote a song. I want to chase storms and do a lot more before my time runs out.

And now I have a life on the East Coast that means I’ll probably never live just a few hours’ drive from targets in the Alley, which means I’m going to continue to miss huge events like last week’s tornadoes unless I can somehow afford to — or desire to — shed a lot of the other things I do.

At this point — 2024 marks my 28th season — I’ve missed way more events than I’ve caught. But I’ve caught some incredible ones.

A hard lesson to learn if you’re really obsessed with storms is that you will NOT see everything. Sometimes you’ll even be on the right storm and not see the tornado, and it hurts. I still sting over some of my misses, but life is short, and you have to decide if you want to balance other priorities with the thrill of chasing.

Caveat: “Thrill” is not a great word to use, because it’s associated with an adrenaline rush, with courting danger, with “zero metering” (getting into a tornado, which I’ll never do intentionally). Adrenaline happens, of course, and so do mistakes, but the thrill for me is capturing nature’s spectacles along with the freedom of roving the country and going wherever the weather is. Seeing old friends is a huge part of chasing for me, too. And if I can capture beautiful structure, I don’t even care that much if I don’t see the tornado.

 

The sky still calls, and so does the art

Video has been totally devalued, so “getting the shot” is more for my satisfaction than for my occasional video sales (I’m not averse to sales, mind you!). And now YouTube has stripped monetization from my videos because I don’t get enough traffic. Not that I ever earned much. So I’m still trying to fund my passion, fund the art – sell photos (you can see some at Stolen Butter Gallery), sell books, and share beautiful things that people like. (You can Buy Me a Coffee with the links on this site if you enjoy my content.)

Some people say content is free, but you have to be able to afford to make it, or the only thing we’ll see is reductive AI iterations of storms and stories. And who wants that? So the struggle goes on.

Given chasing is rarely a fortune-making endeavor, it comes down to: Why do I chase? Still?

The wonder. The satisfaction of nailing a forecast. The exploration. I mentioned the freedom. And photography still drives me when I chase storms. My sensibility has evolved from a journalistic viewpoint to more of an artistic one.

When you’re “running and gunning” with stills and video, there’s extra challenge to framing a meaningful shot. Sometimes you just want to document the moment. And that’s OK. But when an opportunity presents itself to say more, you have to recognize it and take it.

That artistic quest, finding meaning in the moment, will never stop challenging me. And it’s another reason I keep going back to Tornado Alley.

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Keep up with our chases on my Sky Diary page and on social media. Follow me on YouTube, Instagram, and the Funnel Vision page on Facebook.

It’s been months since I photographed a rocket launch, even though we’ve had a lot of them here on the Space Coast. I’ve been busy working and also writing books (under my pen name). There’s only so much time in the day … or the year. Which is almost over. But I couldn’t resist checking out the SpaceX Heavy launch and booster return on a beautiful evening … followed by another SpaceX launch, a Falcon 9 carrying more Starlink satellites.

My framing was a bit off for the Heavy launch, meaning the returning boosters can be seen just at the right edge of the composite image. Both images were shot on the edge of the Indian River Lagoon in Rockledge in slightly different locations. I wanted to include the pretty boat lit up for the holidays. The only disappointment is that from this angle, I couldn’t get the moon in the launch shot with my 12-24mm lens.

When I saw a big line of storms approaching the east coast of Florida with lots of lightning on June 19, I figured I could get into position to photograph it. But Act I of the chase was disappointing. I parked at the St. Johns River west of Cocoa and photographed the line coming in. Just about all the lightning was in the clouds. I caught the shelf cloud, then as the rain hit, I scurried east and holed up at home with the scared dogs while it pounded over us.

But as the line was passing, I noticed a flash out our back door and thought, lightning crawlers? It was worth a try.

I missed one or two amazing crawlers, like fireworks across the sky, as I tried to get set up along the Indian River Lagoon in Rockledge. Just when I was about to give up hope, a dazzling lightning crawler exploded across the sky from horizon to horizon. A quick preview of the shot showed it might be overexposed – this was a seriously bright bolt for a crawler. Fortunately, with a slight exposure adjustment in editing, it looked fantastic!

I got a few more crawlers, none quite as spectacular. I moved to near Rockledge High School as more rain moved in. Now I shot from within my car to stay sort of dry (the camera still got wet; I had to wipe the lens frequently) and to stay safer. And in spite of the rain, I caught several more lovely lightning crawlers. Just before midnight, I headed home. This was the best lightning I’d seen on the Space Coast in a long time.

When do you see crawlers? In my experience, it’s usually late in the storm cycle, as severe storms have lost some of their power but are still electrified. Patience is essential, as great crawlers can occur several minutes apart. Crawlers can be intracloud (within one storm) or intercloud (between storm clouds). Some folks call it sheet lightning, spider lightning, streak lightning or heat lightning, a colloquial term also used for diffuse flashes caused by a storm that’s too far away to be seen.

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On the last day of our 2023 chase in the Plains, Alethea Kontis and I headed back to New Mexico for one more try. We watched clouds bubble up from infancy to make pretty little storms west of Tatum before abandoning those for a severe storm near Portales. It was rotating but not serious about doing anything, and soon the storms started to merge.

 

We booked east into Texas, trying to stay ahead of them – and then to get a view as a large arcus cloud formed. It wasn’t a layered shelf cloud, but it was dramatic, filling the sky.

After photographing an eerie orange sunset under a bank of dark purple clouds, we dropped to I-10, where the intensifying storms laid down a barrage of lightning bolts. The timelapse video is pretty darn cool. From there, it was south to Fort Stockton, chasing lightning all the way, with a final stop at the town’s road runner statue. In all, it was an epic end to our voyage to Tornado Alley.

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Our chase season has been the domain of New Mexico, no doubt about it. And today we explored the arid southeast corner of the state and the adjacent area of Texas, which was a lot less arid as the day went on thanks to flooding.

We skipped from Kermit, Texas, up to Jal, New Mexico, watching developing clouds while knowing the better chance of a tornado was farther south. We just didn’t have the heart to chase in that territory and took our chances. And the storm we followed came pretty close. It had a rotating wall cloud as it crossed the highway, and then it enrobed itself in rain and hail and moved east into an area with no roads at all. So much for that.

 

So we repositioned east and filmed beautiful if linear storms and, eventually, a rainbow after driving through the flooded town of Seminole, Texas. Even on marginal days like this, it’s satisfying to see the sky at work.

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Maybe it was a longing to chase in more “traditional” parts of Tornado Alley after so much time in New Mexico, or just to spend a little time in Kansas, but we drove on up through Kansas from Liberal to southern Nebraska to chase a pretty little low-precipitation storm on May 29, 2023.

 

It wasn’t much. But the scenery was beautiful, and the cows were amusing. And we’re hard-core, I guess!

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Storm chasers traditionally have a steak after seeing a tornado. If you have time. The irony is, when you’re busy chasing, you don’t have a ton of time to stop at a steak house or even an Applebee’s. So sometimes, you end up anticipating the tornado with a steak in advance. Especially if you stop at The Big Texan in Amarillo.

That’s where Alethea Kontis, Jason Persoff and I had lunch on May 28, 2023. Jason was happy with his chase the day before and didn’t plan on going out, so we said farewell after lunch, and Alethea and I went in search of storms. Chances weren’t high of a tornado, but what followed was an extraordinary sequence of events that culminated in a tornado and a powerful, highly structured supercell in the Texas Panhandle.

 
We aimed for initiation and watched a few clouds grow into a shower and then a lovely spinning storm, which we followed until it dropped some hail and headed off into unreachable territory … even as more storms formed to the west on what seemed to be a boundary. Were they forming west or moving west? Or both? The storm motion seemed cockeyed, but we kept on a storm whose persistent rotation drew us closer … and then we spotted the tornado. It persisted for a while, a white cone whose wispy point danced sinuously on the ground southeast of Stratford, Texas.

 
I thought another area of rotation was going to be the next tornado, but the stars didn’t align; if it did happen, we didn’t see it. But we got in front of the storm, which became a massive, layered behemoth sending out sparks of lightning as the sun began to set.

 
With storms now coming at us from the north and west, we elected to move south and avoid the pincer maneuver while getting a few more shots. What a stunning storm!

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May 26 and 27 continued the theme of 2023: storm chasing in New Mexico. Specifically, chasing in and out and around Clovis, whose radar site was unfortunately down.

Alethea Kontis and I met up with Jason Persoff and saw pretty but unambitious storms on May 26 that petered out early. May 27 was more promising and brought us around in multiple circles as we chased rotating supercells. It was really a beautiful day of desert and flood and spectacular skies, as the video shows. We made a couple of stops by a gorgeous old church in Taiban that one chaser after another visited to get a few shots.

 
We also had to ford a flooded road, which was tested by some guys in a much bigger vehicle than ours, and then Jason, before we took the plunge, so to speak. The water wasn’t moving, and we got through it with no trouble. In an area with a lot more roads, we might not have tried it. But given the huge distances one had to drive in any detour, going through seemed the best option.

So with spinning storms and spinning chasers, we dizzily ended the day with a pretty sunset and a few lightning bolts. And I had to get a few shots of The Big Lebowski murals on the walls of the Clovis bowling alley. Dude!

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Sometimes small chances lead to big payoffs when storm chasing – like the gorgeous, lightning-filled spinning supercell Alethea Kontis and I caught in New Mexico on May 25, 2023.

We’d seen a beautiful, dusty supercell the previous day and ended up in Amarillo. We headed west toward New Mexico, not expecting much, and played around in the strip of cool vintage Retro 66 landmarks in Tucumcari. Tee Pee Curios is amazing and filled with wonderful goodies.

Speaking for myself, I was out of practice in the Chaser Patience department. We considered giving up, though I wanted to hedge our bets and stop and do some timelapses of the clouds just east of the Texas border.

The sky was gorgeous, and finally, storms initiated in the Land of Enchantment. So it was back over the border, where we were greeted by a towering anvil filled with mammatus over one of a couple of storms that had formed. As afternoon turned to evening, one became spectacularly dominant, a layered, spinning supercell spitting out almost constant lightning. The video is absolutely magical.

The bad news: Wind blew over my tripod with one of my Nikons on board, damaging my favorite wide-angle lens. I’d had the 12-24mm for years and didn’t realize that night that it wasn’t working correctly after its plummet to the earth, so I had issues with soft focus on the later photos I took of the supercell. Drat! I’m writing this almost a year later; the lens has been replaced. But the rest of the trip meant being very judicious about focusing if I used that lens, or I just used another lens.

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