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Checking in from the Florida east coast! After getting the weakened eye of Hurricane Milton – still at Category 1 when it passed over my location on Florida’s Space Coast – I’m counting us very lucky indeed.

My heart goes out to everyone with damage, from the west coast, where big Category 3 winds and storm surge hit many Florida communities we love, to the east coast, menaced by monster tornadoes of the kind that are rare even in the Plains. One hit Cocoa Beach, not that far from us, and we had a few exciting moments in our semi-basement as I watched the radar. Part of me wishes I’d been chasing the tornadoes farther south, even though tropical tornadoes are difficult to chase given how dang fast they are, but I wanted to be home with hubby and the dogs. I hate to see the devastation and loss of life. It’s hard enough prepping for a hurricane, but even good hurricane prep doesn’t fully protect you against a violent tornado.

We had some minor tree damage at our house and a leak that isn’t going to be fun to find, though there was worse in our immediate neighborhood, as you can see from the photos here. And now I’m on a bit of a fact-checking rampage. Here’s a graphic I made showing the number of early tornado reports as recorded by the Storm Prediction Center for Hurricane Milton. There were 126 warnings issued on Oct. 9, according to reliable news outlets, and there were 47 initial tornado reports, contrary to even wilder numbers people are sharing on social media.

There’s confusion, I think, about what warnings mean. A warning doesn’t always translate to a tornado, as warnings are sometimes based on radar, and multiple warnings may be issued for the same tornado as it moves from one county to the next. A report doesn’t necessarily mean there was a tornado, but sometimes multiple reports can be made about the same tornado. Damage studies by the National Weather Service and photographic evidence help refine the numbers. We should be getting more accurate numbers soon, but as of today, Oct. 11, 2024, this is what we know. (Click on the graphic to see a larger version.)

 
There’s a lot of crap floating around social media, including a nice photo of a shelf cloud taken in Cocoa, Florida, that’s being labeled as Milton coming ashore. I thought it might be my photo at first, but it’s by photographer Jennifer Cenker, who shot it on Oct. 1 from Merritt Island, looking west toward Cocoa. Someone stole it from her, labeled it as Milton, and it spread like wildfire. It’s very similar to one I took from almost the same location of a summer thunderstorm, with the Cocoa water tower visible at the end of the bridge. Please don’t share stuff unless you know where it comes from. This was my cranky Facebook post.

 
And lastly, a word about weather manipulation. Sure, humans have played with cloud seeding for a long time. It’s been tried in an attempt to increase rain or snow (which can work) or decrease hail (which probably doesn’t). And there have been other experiments in weather manipulation over the years. Did you know there was a phenomenon in Europe in the late 1800s that involved firing cannons at storms to prevent hail, on the theory that smoke might interfere with its formation? Hail cannons didn’t work, either, but the linked article shows how use of them snowballed — mostly thanks to people believing what they wanted to believe.

 
For your reading pleasure, check out the text from a 1902 American Meteorological Society report on the Third International Congress on Hail Shooting. It’s funny how often hail disasters are excused by imprecise shooting of the cannons. “The shooting stations generally report good results, but cases of failure are believed to be the consequence of poor organization, feeble cannon or delay in shooting; nevertheless the severe misfortune at Mantua occurred in spite of perfect shooting and can not be excused.” Gentlemen, I smell a rat.

Scientists make theories and experiment, and sometimes experiments prove them wrong. Then they come up with new theories. That’s how science works.

And despite other experimentation over the years, weather manipulation attempts on tornadoes or hurricanes do not work. Scientists can’t change the course of hurricanes, and politicians certainly can’t. Experiments in cloud-seeding hurricanes in the twentieth century did nothing. Hurricanes are monsters. Hurricane Katrina in a week released energy equivalent to 4 million Hiroshima atomic bombs. Humans have no technology that comes close to affecting the strength or path of these storms. So please take a deep breath before you share this stuff. If it sounds like a good story, it might be just that — a story. Maybe when you “do your own research,” you could consult actual scientists who have done actual research.

Thanks to the meteorologists who’ve been working tirelessly to make the forecasts and to get out warnings, from the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service to the TV meteorologists who’ve been working crazy hours and newspapers publishing essential information. And let’s not forget the NOAA and U.S. Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunters, whose continual flights into Milton brought real-time reports and data that were fed into the computer models. I can’t imagine how exhausting this past week has been. That said, let me know the next time you have an empty seat on the P-3, OK?

Keep your eyes to the skies, folks. The season isn’t over.

 

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.

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.

The first Cape Canaveral Lighthouse began operation in 1849. The cast-iron version that replaced it began working in 1868. It was moved over a mile inland in the 1890s to keep it safe from erosion. The original Fresnel lens has been removed because launches were literally shaking the glass pieces out of their framework, and the light no longer rotates — or it didn’t when we were there. It just blinks.

Still, the lighthouse makes a dramatic foreground for a launch photo. I can’t help but contrast ships from centuries past with today’s spacecraft, like the SpaceX Falcon 9 that launched on Saturday, September 10. (You can read more about the lighthouse’s history and how to visit it here.)

 
I’d never had a chance to shoot a launch from here before, though I’d always wanted to. We sometimes get access to a car pass, and we had the rare opportunity to get a ticket for this site. The weather was iffy for a while after tremendous rainstorms in the afternoon. Clouds and showers lingered and showed a reluctance to clear out.

Pad 39A is north of the lighthouse, and I could only hope I’d lined up my shot so the rocket wouldn’t lift off behind the tower — and that we’d see more than the first few seconds. A bit of glow in the clouds and some reckoning with a map app helped. I wanted the lighthouse to be framed by the arc of the streak.

As the rocket lifted off, it became clear that the northeastward trajectory meant the rocket wouldn’t lift high enough (visually, anyway) to rise above the lighthouse. For a second I hoped it might pass right behind the light at the top, but still, it made for a very pretty scene. I cropped the vertical shot into a square one.

I shot the launch with a second camera using my 10mm fisheye lens (below). I like this, too, because the lightkeeper’s cottage (a replica) is visible at left. And the GoPro timelapse video is a fun little glimpse of the lift-off after the moonrise, which was almost directly behind us. The clouds and rain thinned out just enough to make this photo opportunity work.

The rocket carried more Starlink internet satellites and the new (and alarmingly large) BlueWalker 3 communications array, which will soon show up in our photos, no doubt.

Whew! What a wild, wonderful, windy morning it was on the Indian River Lagoon today! With winds topping 30 mph, there were actually whitecaps on the waves, a rare occurrence around here.

The cool weather was also welcome, as I expect we’ll soon get into the summer heat, with no escape in sight for months.

The brisk weather was somehow soothing, and I shot a little video to capture these lovely conditions, which came in the wake of a cold front. It’s so relaxing to watch as the palm trees sway and the waves move and sparkle. Enjoy.

I’ve seen an occasional sun halo here in east-central Florida, and I’ve also seen sun dogs. But I’ve never seen a halo of the complexity I witnessed the afternoon of February 10 in Rockledge. My best shot of the phenomenon was my first, with my phone. I got my “real” camera a little late to capture it when it was at its best. But it was still pretty amazing and lingered for a while.

There are names for all of the arcs you see in the images. The light effects are created when sunlight interacts with ice crystals in the atmosphere. And some of the best ones you’ll see are in cold environments where “diamond dust” ice particles hover lower in the air as well. That’s why I was so surprised to see these pretty decent effects in Florida on a warm day.

The round circle is a 22-degree halo. The bright lights in the ring on either side are sun dogs, or parhelia. Wikipedia helped me identify the other arcs. The upside-down “rainbow” at the top is a circumzenithal arc, seen resting atop a supralateral arc (this is visible as a faint rainbow-type arc in the wider shots). There also seems to be an upper tangent arc kissing the top of the 22-degree halo.

Now I’ll be anxious to see if I can catch this phenomenon again … before I can travel to a colder clime to get a really elaborate demonstration.

I’m back-dating this post, as I didn’t have a chance to post the photos before now. And also, somehow, I hoped maybe I’d get to chase in Tornado Alley this season. Given the ongoing pandemic and the possibility of either getting and spreading COVID-19 or increasing the burden on some small town’s health system if I did get it when I was on the road, it seemed like the responsible thing to do to not head to the Plains. Turns out, except for a couple of pretty photo opportunities, I don’t feel like I’ve missed all that much, storm-wise. What I have missed is that sense of freedom while following the weather around a gorgeous landscape, late-night diner meals, and seeing my friends who share the same passion for weather as I do.  I really hope the world is looking better in 2021.

All that said, on April 20, there were tornadoes in Central Florida. I did a local chase, heading to Mims, and caught a rotating storm with a decent wall cloud as it crossed U.S. 1.  No tornado, but it was pretty nice.

Hurricane Irma raged through Florida on Sept. 10, 2017. These are a few photos from before, during and mostly after the storm in east-central Florida, showing extensive damage along the Indian River Lagoon in Brevard County, specifically Rockledge and Cocoa.

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

On May 16, Kathy Velasquez and I targeted the western Oklahoma Panhandle with an eye toward seeing a storm that might produce a tornado.

Despite a lot of cloud cover and relatively cold temperatures, we saw just that – plus beautiful storm structure as we chased storms into the Texas Panhandle.

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