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 …
My road through publishing has been twisted since Funnel Vision, Tornado Pinball and Zap Bang. How can writers choose their happiest path? The release of Twisters this summer has me thinking a lot about fictional accounts of storm chasing—and my own writing. I’m a storm chaser, and I took the movie for what it was: …
Almost every year, I seek to capture the enchanting unfolding of night-blooming cereus flowers. Each giant blossom of these cactus vines blooms for just one night. The blooming season lasts a few weeks in the spring, though it seemed a bit longer this year – in fact, I just saw a bloom a couple of …
We started May 23 with casual optimism about our chase prospects. The fun part was that Alethea Kontis and I were storm chasing with Jason Persoff and Dave Lewison (Bill Hark had ended up elsewhere the previous day, but he would get great close-up views of what was to come). And we were chasing dryline …
May 19 produced the storm we’d been waiting for the whole trip, the best storm so far — though another even more extraordinary one would come later. And it was a great day even if we didn’t see — really see — the tornado. More on that in a minute. We figured storms would …
The thing about “chasing scraps,” as we call it when there isn’t a really promising forecast for supercells, is that it can wear you out. That’s partly because of all the driving – if you’re ambitious, you go wherever there’s a chance of storms. So after a couple of days of photographing beautiful places …
