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I’m busy trying to meet several work deadlines before heading out west to Tornado Alley, but the east coast of Florida has provided some welcome distractions for a storm chaser this month. We’ve had shelf clouds and lightning, though the lightning was a bit sparse. Let’s just say I spent several hours clicking the shutter for the little bit I got.

Still, there’s nothing more therapeutic than standing by the ocean, listening to the waves and thunder, while trying to capture a lightning bolt with my camera. Check out all the April storm photos below.

Stay tuned – the Tornado Alley chase is coming soon!

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

It’s been about a year since I chased tornado-warned storms in central Florida. This is one of the most popular videos on my YouTube channel. Of course, I didn’t see any tornadoes, but there was some awesome cloud structure on March 29, 2014, that sure looked like one for a minute.

It’s been mostly quiet in east-central Florida so far this year, with a little severe weather passing through last week. Even in Florida, we’re feeling the effect of a long, cold winter – only here it’s cool and beautiful!

My chaser friends are starting to buzz about the season to come. Will there be an early burst of activity in May? Will the more serious severe weather pattern kick in later? Now the suspense begins. I’ll be posting updates here and at SkyDiary.com, my storm-chasing site, as I chase storms in Florida and in Tornado Alley. Stay tuned.

 
This wasn’t the best chase year for me, if you define successful storm chasing by how many tornadoes you see.

May was a historically slow time for tornadoes, and I wasn’t in the Plains for the three-day tornado-mageddon event that produced the Pilger, Nebraska, tornado and others.

Still, I photographed a lot of beautiful storms and skies in Florida and Tornado Alley, and while I did so, I finished my research for “Zap Bang” and published it in September – the third novel in my Storm Seekers trilogy. And even if I didn’t see incredible tornadoes, my characters did!

Here’s a slide show that looks back at 2014’s dramatic skies through photography.

“Into the Storm” is in theaters, and one might call it the first real theatrical film about storm chasing since “Twister” in 1996. I wouldn’t, however, because the film’s “storm chasing” couldn’t be farther from the real thing. This is disaster porn, plain and simple.

In sensibility, Steven Quale’s film is closer to a TV movie, with a grim main plot (tornadoes terrorize a small town, especially its teenagers, while the incompetent “chasers” try to film and survive them) and one outlandish but funny subplot (YouTube-loving rednecks chase the tornadoes, slapstick-style).

What does “Into the Storm” have going for it? Incredible computer graphics. These are among the best stormy special effects I’ve ever seen. But they are supported by a story and characters that inspire more unintentional laughter than suspense and thrills. Cool tornado sequences do not equate to great drama or exciting action. There’s a lot of drudgery between the tornadoes, and even the deaths are highly predictable.

“Twister” was no masterpiece, but it did have a sense of humor, memorable characters and dialogue, and a compelling story arc. The script in “Into the Storm” lacks those, but it may be remembered (by storm chasers, at least) for its loopy inaccuracies. When the supposedly multi-degreed researcher (Sarah Ann Callies) says the “systems” are too chaotic to track, or when said researcher/forecaster is taken completely by surprise by hail and tornadoes and gets her warnings from television, or when the radar displayed on their wall of monitors doesn’t match the weather, or when the chase team keeps talking about seeing a “vortex,” or when the team just sits around waiting for storms that supposedly are already in progress, you have to wonder what kind of stupid chasers they are. It’s especially disheartening that Callies’ character, the one major female role in the film, is such a dolt. But nobody in this film can be called a genius. With a $50 million budget, could the filmmakers not have taken a storm chaser out to dinner and asked a few questions about how storms and chasing really work?

The chasers drive around in a tank reminiscent of Sean Casey’s Tornado Intercept Vehicle, helmed by a jerk named Pete (Matt Walsh). But like all of the characters, he is barely developed and kind of bland. I can’t blame the actors entirely. They didn’t have much to work with. Perhaps most sympathetic is Richard Armitage as the dad/school official who tries to get everyone to safety. He’s dour but believable.

Credibility in the film is further strained by its halfhearted documentary style. The story is supposedly told through various video camera footage — including excruciatingly long speeches by teens in peril – but not convincingly so.

By the time the “eye of the tornado” appears, some audience giggling is inevitable. I hated to laugh at all of these earnest folks, especially when some of the movie seems inspired by (one might say exploits) the deadly Joplin tornado, but I fear it’s just too silly to take seriously. And it really wants you to take it seriously. If you added some sharks, it would be a different story.

Chris Kridler is a storm chaser who once wrote movie reviews for The Baltimore Sun and has penned her own storm-chasing adventures, the Storm Seekers Series.

Storms in Brevard County, Florida, on August 9 grew strong quickly, forming scalloped shelf clouds and dumping prodigious amounts of rain.

Rain forced me to cancel a portrait shoot, so I dashed across the Indian River Lagoon and shot the storm coming in over Cocoa, Florida, at 5:02 p.m.

I got ahead of the storms by rushing to Merritt Island and shooting back east at Cocoa, then continuing east to Cocoa Beach and ultimately Port Canaveral. 

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.

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!

A note for e-mail subscribers: I am phasing out the Feedburner e-mail service, since Google no longer supports it and I can no longer access it. Please use the link to the right on my site to sign up for the new e-mail list; if you get two copies, please unsubscribe from the Feedburner e-mail. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m at the mercy of the vagaries of the mega-corporation.

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.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.

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.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.

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.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.

 
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.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.