Category Archives: Storm Chasing

Looks like a severe weather day across the central high plains on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I have off through Saturday, so I plan on chasing in SW Nebraska and NW Kansas on Thursday and Friday. This will give me a chance to utilize the great tools of the “www.spotternetwork.org“. I plan on uploading my GPS coordinates to the www.spotternetwork.org page as well as to my own website via the StormLab software. Assuming I have a wireless signal, viewers will be able to watch my position in real time as I storm chase. Below is an example of what viewers might see (this was a practice run east of Albuquerque…you can see radar imagery will also be displayed).

I plan on having this “live” image incorporated into my blog on my homepage (just like it is now except the image will hopefully only be a couple minutes old). You can see an additional explanation here. Or you can watch my location as well as hundreds of other storm spotters and chasers via the www.spotternetwork.org.

Prospects for tornadic supercells are high tomorrow with a sharp dryline and warm front meeting up around a deepening surface low. Great 0-1km helicity will be in place with plenty of mid to upper level wind shear. The only concern I have is getting to my target area in time for the action. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover to get into a favorable area. Storms will also be moving very rapidly due to a 0-6km mean wind of 40kt from the south, and motions will get much more chaotic once storms start rotating. So, it may be very difficult to keep up with them. We’ll see. Wish me luck.

I finally had some scans from last spring scanned, including these lightning pictures.  These were shot on May 17, 2007 from the balcony of our old house in the NE heights of Albuquerque.  This first one was a double exposure; the first shot was a zoomed-in exposure of nothing but a full moon on a clear night in March; the second shot was an 8 second exposure on May 17th of the lightning and remaining foreground.  In other words, I took two pictures on the same frame of film.  Instead of advancing the film after the first shot of the moon, I waited to re-expose it with a second shot which happened to be the lightning.

The remaining 3 shots had exposure times ranging from about 8 to 30 seconds.

A surge of unseasonably moist air finally ejected out of New Mexico and into Western TX on Monday, allowing a dryline to take shape and spawn a few severe storms. I made my way into the panhandle late Monday afternoon, hoping to get a quick glimpse of some kind of significant structure. Everything was quickly evolving into a linear MCS by the time I got in good position. I followed the southernmost storm since it was remaining discrete from the squall line to the north, but nothing really noteworthy took shape. I was hoping to at least see a shelf cloud, but the storm never seemed to generate a deep cold pool to start that process. Here’s a few pictures from near Groom, TX (looking south at the turbulent outflow overtaking me from the west).

Otherwise, the only thing I saw were a few dime sized hail stones. I was hoping Tuesday would pan out to be a better chase day, but everything developed farther north in Northwest KS. I just couldn’t bring myself to venture that far north.

After getting off work at 4 p.m. I quickly jetted westward to intercept a N-S oriented line of severe storms pushing eastward across E Colorado.  The southern most storm was exhibiting supercellular characteristics and Continue reading »

Well, the 4th turned out to be a surprise.  No severe storms were expected due to a lack of shear and seemingly low instability, however, several subtle outflow boundaries from the previous evening’s convection were hovering around SW Nebraska and NE Colorado.  There was also a good source of moisture residing Continue reading »