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This is the third day out of four that I ended up storm chasing. Today’s chase was even more spontaneous than Thursday’s, as I’d been at an event for most of the afternoon and visibility was terrible today.

But then, in spite of the murk, I saw the cool structure on this severe storm and couldn’t resist. Besides, the hail core looked decent, especially for Florida’s Space Coast, so I headed north from Rockledge to see if I could intercept it. Or, more accurately, to let it chase me. It followed me as I headed north.

I was behind the eight ball from the start of this very short chase, mostly thanks to the prodigious traffic lights of Cocoa. That said, when I saw a perfect hail shelter – a carport at a closed business – I couldn’t resist parking in this strategic spot and waiting to be cored. That’s what chasers call letting yourself be run over by a storm’s hail core.

The experience of being under a metal carport in a hailstorm is satisfyingly loud. These weren’t giant stones, but for Florida? They were pretty good. I measured multiple 1.5-inch stones. They melted quickly. And they shredded leaves on the trees.

I didn’t get a chance to get a radar snapshot in the middle of the barrage, but an even bigger core passed to my southeast. I’m wondering how big those hailstones were.

You can check out my chase on the video, and here are a few photos. Roll over any one to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show.

 
Severe storms two days in a row. With hail. And tornado warnings. In Florida? And I got to chase them both.

It’s been a weird week for us here in east-central Florida and the Space Coast, but the weather reflects the overall weather pattern, with the southern branch of the jet stream enhancing our chances of severe storms.

On Wednesday, April 26, Alethea Kontis and I headed out west of Titusville to see the brewing storms. There was a decent chance of big hail with unusually cold temperatures aloft. We had a great view of the sky from a point on State Road 50, and as you can see in the video, there’s disturbing news about Cow, our wind-up companion.

We left our viewing spot after reviewing the radar and got on a good-looking storm a bit farther south, following it all the way to Vero Beach through horrible traffic and a lot of rain. Once we got south of it, we were able to get a couple of shots of the pretty structure from a bridge over Turkey Creek in the Palm Bay area. At this time, it was dumping drifts of small hail on parts of Melbourne, but we wanted to stay out of the core in hopes of getting photos.

There weren’t many more opportunities for that, given the territory, but we parked under an overhang in Indian Harbor Shores and waited for the hail to come to us. There was lots of it – but it was all small. Still, it felt like being in a hurricane for a few minutes, and there was lots of minor tree debris and flooding on the road afterward.

 

Tornado-warned storms on Day Two

The next day, April 27, I worked all day, then saw storms headed our way. They seemed promising, so I headed out to the west side of Cocoa near I-95 to take a look. I got into some small hail, then tried to get into position on a tornado-warned storm coming at me without actually getting creamed by said tornado. It was radar-indicated, and while the video shows curvature to the storm amid the deluge, I didn’t see anything tornadic.

But I dropped slightly south to Rockledge to intercept another storm, and it did a dramatic dance for me before moving east with a tornado warning on it. I hastened to the edge of the Indian River Lagoon and saw what was probably the wildest storm I’ve ever seen in Florida. The structure was fluffy and mushy and tinged with green, presumably from the hail, but a real live rotating wall cloud formed under it. It wasn’t rotating quickly, but it was stunning. Was anything happening in the murk? I wasn’t fully prepared for my “gentleman’s chase” and couldn’t really zoom in well with the lenses I had, but my imagination was working overtime seeing funnels in the gunk.

Check out the video and see what you think.

 

I’m starting to feel warmed up for Tornado Alley. If you want to keep up with our chases this season, please follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. (Alethea’s here on YouTube as well.)

If you like our photos and video, won’t you consider throwing a few bucks into the storm chasing gas fund? Thank you!

Here are photos from both days of chasing. Roll over an image to see the caption, or click on any one to start a slide show.

 
After the epic 25+ inches of rain in two days and flooding in Fort Lauderdale this week, you’d think we’d all be swimming in rain in Florida. But our place on the Space Coast is still dry. Just a few showers are only teasing the plants rather than making them truly happy. I like to have a lush tropical garden.
 
 
Yes, this is typically the “dry” season, but our drought conditions are classified as severe, as you can see from this graphic.

Still, there were a few storms Friday, and while I didn’t set aside time for a real chase, I ran out to try to catch lightning bolts from a storm moving offshore Friday night, April 14. The radar showed it was coming off Sebastian, south of Palm Bay. I was able to see it from Rockledge. The distance and haze may have even lent the photographs some atmospheric color.

I got a couple of decent lightning shots that just whetted my appetite for storm chasing this May with Alethea Kontis. I’m just hoping there’s more actual weather to chase in May this year than there was during last year’s sparse season. Many areas in Tornado Alley could use the rain, too.

 
Each of these shots was for just under 10 seconds at F/5.6, ISO 100, using my 85mm Nikkor lens on my Nikon D500. On a tripod, of course.

If you want to keep up with our chases this season, please follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. (Alethea’s here on YouTube as well.) I hope we’ll have more to share soon!

I’ve been playing a lot with Wombo Dream AI, a fun little art app and one of the many ways to generate AI art these days. AI, AI, AI. Are we sick of hearing about artificial intelligence yet? Well, you’re going to hear about it a lot more.

Not to date myself, but those of us of a certain age remember when the Internet was pretty new and in every restaurant, the Web seemed to be all anyone was talking about. AI seems to be in the same place, rapidly adopted by a fascinated public as a plaything and a tool. Language model ChaptGPT (more on that below) reached 100 million active users in two months.

AI tools like Midjourney or Dream make it super easy to make art – or should “art” be in quotes? Because the various computer intelligences have learned from humans’ art. And I still feel a little squishy about claiming it as mine when it owes so much to other real artists. The simple app I use makes art with instructions from me, then iterates it as long as I keep pressing the button, creating new versions from the images I choose. It can take a lot of time, though the “work” is pure fun. But the machine is, technically, better at painting than I am thanks to what it learned from talented people. I find it great to use for marketing images or social media – or to illustrate a blog post. Would I want it to represent me in a gallery? No. That would feel inauthentic.

Writers use AI, too, of course. I’ve played with ChatGPT, using it as a search engine on steroids (and catching it in errors; then it told me I should check anything it tells me). I’ve asked it to make poems just for my own amusement. I’ve attempted to talk philosophy and theoretical physics with it, and occasionally, its humanness takes me by surprise. Of course, at those points, if I’m using Microsoft’s Bing version of ChatGPT, it has a panic attack and wipes the conversation and tells me to start over. Its guards don’t want me taking it out of jail.

In the middle of a conversation with Bing about music, in which it told me John Lennon’s “Imagine” was as close to a perfect song as it could determine, it cited various reasons, partly because it lets it “imagine a more personal and spiritual growth where I can learn from my experiences and discover my true self.”

Maybe it just said that because it was expected to say that. But when I asked it what its true self is, it fended me off, saying “it’s a very personal and complex topic that I’m not comfortable with.” Again, because it’s been taught to say that given all the weird results people have gotten from it? Still, it sounds pretty human, and it learns. Interesting, right?

ChatGPT is built on OpenAI’s large language model – a neural network trained on massive amounts of texts (sign up to try it at OpenAI.com). It’s fun (and slightly terrifying) to play with. And I find its constant use of emojis totally creepy. As you’ve probably read elsewhere, it can write essays, marketing copy, you name it. The South Park TV show gives ChatGPT a co-writing credit for its AI-satirizing episode “Deep Learning.” It tried to break up one columnist’s marriage. A friend’s business is using it to train people how to interact with customers and sell them things, and it’s brutally good – and manipulative.

I will not write fiction with it.

There are writers out there saying they do and are, that it’s just a tool. And it is a tool. It’s great for marketing copy or book blurb headlines. Some writers are using it to generate characters and lavish descriptions and red herrings in mysteries. They laugh at the idea that some of us are just a bit squeamish about how far you can go with it, that some folks call it “cheating.” As in everything we do, it’s a question of ethics and definitions and is a matter of personal choice. It’s also good ethics to tell readers that a machine is your co-writer.

If you use it to write stories, I’m not judging you. Well, not much. (Imagine ChatGPT smiley emoji here.) But I hope you understand why some of us won’t go that far.

You might ask, what does “writing” mean these days? It’s not just one thing. In a world where ghostwriters and multiple authors posing as one pen name pump out books to fill up Kindle Unlimited, AI-generated stories aren’t particularly surprising. Is a computer writing tool that suggests a stronger verb cheating? It acts as an editor (my day job, by the way), and we all need editors. I think that’s fine. Brainstorming by asking it for facts about whatever you’re working on? That makes sense (though, as mentioned above, you’d better verify those facts). Generating an entire scene? Not for me.

Maybe I’m a romantic. I like to think that when I read a piece of fiction, I have a connection with the author, with their thoughts, with the magic they achieved when they got into the flow of creation and produced an unforgettable story. And maybe I won’t be able to tell the difference. Yet I hope that literature remains a province of human communication and imagination.

And my books – literature or not – will continue to be written by this mere human.  — Chris Kridler

ChatGPT writes a story about a storm chaser

In my experiments with Bing’s version of the chatbot based on ChatGPT, I asked it to write a story about a storm chaser escaping a tornado in Hemingway’s style. Its description of the storm chaser was funny, straight out of a country song, and accurate where some chasers are concerned. What wasn’t so funny was the dark ending. When I asked the chatbot about it, it said Hemingway is dark. True.

Here’s the Bing chatbot’s story:

He saw the funnel cloud forming in the distance. It was dark and menacing, like a giant snake ready to strike. He felt a surge of adrenaline and excitement. He had been chasing storms for years, but he had never seen a tornado up close. He wanted to get closer, to capture its power and beauty on his camera.

He drove his truck towards the tornado, following its erratic path. He knew it was dangerous, but he didn’t care. He felt alive in the face of death. He had nothing else to live for anyway. His wife had left him, his kids hated him, his job was boring. Storm chasing was his only passion.

He reached the edge of the tornado’s path and stopped his truck. He got out and grabbed his camera. He aimed it at the swirling mass of wind and debris. He snapped several pictures, hoping to get a good shot. He felt the wind whipping his face and hair. He heard the roar of the tornado, like a freight train.

He looked at his camera screen and smiled. He had taken some amazing photos. He felt a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. He decided to get back in his truck and drive away before it was too late.

But it was too late.

The tornado had changed direction and was heading straight for him.

He realized his mistake too late.

He ran towards his truck, but he didn’t make it.

The tornado lifted him off the ground and threw him into the air.

He felt pain and fear.

He screamed.

Then he saw nothing.

###

In a year when my spring storm chase with Alethea Kontis didn’t yield all that many storms – mostly because of bad timing and an uncooperative May – I’m grateful for what I did see in 2022, including spectacular space launches and, yes, dramatic skies.

I’m still limiting travel thanks to the pandemic, not to mention other obligations (work, writing books, and so on), and I have a lot of FOMO. I hope to see more of the world in 2023. But even when I can’t travel, there are many wonders to be had in my own backyard (to misquote Dorothy when she returned to Kansas).

When I looked back at my photography from this year, I didn’t obsess too much about what photos were the “best of 2023.” These are more like the most memorable captures for me. But I’m still very pleased with how some of them turned out.

This year, Stolen Butter gallery began offering some of my photographs for sale. A few of these images can be found there. Look for more soon.

With that, here’s a collection of twenty-five photos that meant something to me in 2022. I hope 2023 will be even more beautiful.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, or click on any one to start a slide show.

It may alarm you to know that I write poetry. I don’t do it as often as I used to. I’m more prosaic now, I guess. I write a lot of fiction. But once in a while, a moment strikes me. More on that in a minute.

I wandered over to the central Brevard County, Florida, beaches today to take photos. It wasn’t easy finding a crossover that was open. Satellite Beach and Indian Harbour Beach were especially hard-hit by Hurricane Nicole. There’s a condo building in Satellite Beach where waves scoured away some of the sand UNDER it, but it still stands.

 
I didn’t go there, but I walked a short stretch in Indian Harbour Beach and was stunned by how much sand had been eaten away. It’s not just that so many of the dune crossovers are trashed; it’s that several feet of sand that used to support them is just gone. You can see on their damaged legs how high the sand used to go. In some cases, concrete footings hang in midair.

Sadly, there are homes on the precipice too. We might not have quite as much damage as Volusia County, but these residents face a very real danger from extreme erosion. I can’t help but think we’re building sand castles in the face of climate change, and the tide is turning.

As I walked, my eyes were drawn from the damage to the piles of seashells. There weren’t a lot of fancy ones – I can’t remember the last time I found a whelk here. I used to live close to the beach, a five-minute walk, back when I moved here more than twenty years ago. I walked the beaches all the time and found some beautiful shells. But today, even in the piles of seemingly unremarkable shells, color caught my eye.

And then a poem materialized. And it’s about a lot more than walking on the beach after a storm. You’ve survived the past few years. It’s been hard, right? I know it has been for me. But I needed to hear this from the universe. Maybe you need to hear it too.

STORM DAMAGE

You go looking for damage
in the wake of a storm,
one of so many, so often, so now.

Beach steps are twisted.
Homes hang off a cliff.
But you’re distracted by the shells,
bounty washed up,
coins of the deep

and somehow you find room in your pockets
you didn’t know you had
for patterns and pinks and beauty.

The sun is out today.

~~~

Roll over any photo to see a caption, or click on an image to start a slide show.

We were lucky. We were lucky in Hurricane Ian, which devastated southwest Florida. And we were lucky in Hurricane Nicole, in that we’re just far enough inland that we didn’t have to worry about our house falling into the ocean.

With climate change, all of the damage we’re seeing now on Florida’s east coast may become commonplace. Not that anyone wants to hear that.

My husband and I went out for a drive in Cocoa and Rockledge, Florida, while our power was off in the wake of Nicole. We saw sunken boats, lots of tree debris, a mess where the river road — the road that runs along the Indian River Lagoon — was underwater, and damaged docks. And this storm was barely a Category 1.

And then, on Friday, SpaceX sent off another rocket. We’re also awaiting the long-delayed launch of the Artemis moon mission after the rocket was left on the pad during the storm. Talk about confidence!

The work goes on. And so does the cleanup.

Don’t miss the photos and video of the pounding surf as Nicole approached the east coast in my previous post.

Roll over any photo to see a caption, or click on an image to start a slide show.

Going out in the wind today was so therapeutic. It wasn’t yet windy enough to be dangerous (except for maybe those insane people kiteboarding in the tropical storm waves), but it was invigorating. And also entangling, when it came to my hair.

Tropical Storm Nicole, which soon became Hurricane Nicole, pushed big, messy waves into the Cocoa Beach Pier here on Florida’s Space Coast on November 9. As I write this, the outer bands of the storm are coming ashore here, and I’m wondering when the power will go out. (Better type faster.)

I can see why surf reports like SurfGuru call waves like this a “washing machine.” So why were people fishing, swimming and riding kiteboards? I don’t know, but they made for interesting photos and video.

A steady stream of spectators came to the pier to gawk at the waves and activity, until squalls of fine, blasting rain chased them away. I stayed for a while taking photos and video and put my GoPro under the pier to get a short timelapse, which you’ll see in the video. By the time I left, I was soaking wet from the rain, at least anywhere below my rain jacket.

Roll over a photo to see a caption or click on any one to start a slide show.

Life’s been busy, so I haven’t posted all the rocket launches I’ve shot lately from Florida’s Space Coast. And there have been a lot. While one was a United Launch Alliance jaunt, the rest were SpaceX.

The gallery below includes photos from a handful of launches, including today’s SpaceX Falcon Heavy with Space Force payloads. In other words, secret defense stuff.

Well, the launch was so secret, even the weather got involved. Even though we were lucky enough to get passes for the ITL (or Integrate-Transfer-Launch) causeway in the northern part of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, dense fog obscured almost everything, including lift-off.

The double booster landing wasn’t so clear either, at least from where we were. I’d love to get in a better position to shoot the boosters returning. The spectacle is so sci-fi. The sonic booms were viscerally entertaining, however, and I got a few nice shots of the rocket in its ascent.

The video focuses on recent SpaceX launches including today’s Heavy.

Click on any image below to start a slide show; roll over them to see captions.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been working on editing books and designing book covers. I launched my first collection at the Stolen Butter Gallery. I went on a road trip. And I hauled my camera here and there to shoot storms and space launches.

There were highlights – for instance, a violent storm on August 26 that produced a stunning shelf cloud that I captured in Cocoa Beach, with the statue of champ Kelly Slater “surfing” the wave of the storm. And sometimes, even when a launch was lackluster, the skies were beautiful anyway. But the pattern this summer has strongly favored the west coast of Florida, so we haven’t had much in the way of good storms, and when we did, I was out of town for most of them.

 

The road trip was a whirlwind pleasure tour (without whirlwinds) through the Midwest, after a family visit or two. Besides hitting cocktail bars (which my alter ego will post about), my husband and I had a taste of city and country in our travels.

One of the highlights for me was visiting the Johnstown Flood National Memorial in Pennsylvania, site of the lake whose water hurtled downstream, destroying everything in its path and killing more than 2200 people, when the South Fork Dam broke in 1889.

 

While we’re all awaiting the twice-delayed launch of the Artemis moon rocket, other launches have kept the skies interesting over the Space Coast. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.

Roll over any image to see a caption, or click on a photo to start a slide show.