It’s a good thing I have dogs to walk, because when I’m buried in work or hiding in my writing cave, it’s easy to forget that the skies can be beautiful, and looking at them can be really therapeutic. The dogs got me outside early this evening in time to see convective towers creating pileus clouds, a type of lenticular cloud.

Pileus are short-lived wispy caps that form atop growing storm clouds, above strong updrafts. And I knew from previous experience that with the sun going down behind the building clouds, it was possible those pileus would display some iridescence. Or in the vernacular, they’d look like “rainbow clouds.”

I caught a fleeting and ethereal display of this iridescence as I looked west from Rockledge, Florida. The first couple of photos in the gallery below were shot with iPhone. The second two were of another storm, taken with a Nikon camera and cropped. They show that when the sunlight hits the ice particles forming in the pileus caps, it creates the rainbow effect as the light is diffracted. They’re quite magical.

The storms merged and pushed out a shelf cloud as it was getting dark, so I ran out and got a few photos as this layered, gloomy beast moved across the Space Coast. The heavy rain and lightning followed.

I went out one more time after the storms had mostly passed and shot photos looking east over the Indian River Lagoon. I was surprised at how much cloud-to-ground lightning still sparked as the storms moved over the ocean. There were a few lightning crawlers, too; I missed a couple of good ones, but I included one of the lesser ones here. I cropped all of these lightning photos to show off the intricate and amazing detail in the bolts.

Click on any image to see a larger version.

It’s been a weird summer here on Florida’s Space Coast. We’ve had weeks with no rain at all during the height of the supposed storm season, though this past week, we finally had some relief in the form of two gully-washer days in a row.

Tonight a couple of isolated storms popped up to our west, moving my way, and I realized I might have my first chance this summer for a local lightning chase. So I headed out to a favorite spot in Rockledge to capture the storms at sunset. For a little while, the storm popped with lightning almost continuously. Then it sent out what looked like an outflow boundary and clouds got in the way of my view.

 
I moved west through Cocoa to a spot on the St. Johns River, hoping to get some cloud-to-ground lightning. As the storm weakened, there were a few bolts that I was pretty sure I missed. But I was luckier than I thought, and I was able to salvage a few so-so shots in editing. One was a blown-out bolt that was pretty spectacular, especially cropped as a vertical.

Here are a few shots from tonight. You can click on each thumbnail to see a larger version.

 

I almost missed my chance to film a time-lapse of the night-blooming cereus flowers this year. These are the gorgeous flowers that form on a cactus vine that is now crawling up a palm tree, an oak tree (on purpose – I’ve seen pictures of a spectacular one in central Florida and hope to get there someday), and around my chaotic, currently weedy deck garden. Each flower lasts only one night.

I missed the “big night” – there’s always one night when many, many of the blooms explode – because I returned from chasing storms the day after. But the blooms do appear for a while, popping up here and there. Until they don’t.

I’ve made several of these videos that you can see on my YouTube channel (please subscribe!), including a mini documentary that will tell you a little more about the blooms. This year’s video focuses on the mesmerizing beauty of one of these flowers as it opens. Check it out.

 
We’re back from Tornado Alley! This trip with my storm-chasing partner Alethea Kontis went all too quickly, even though it was two and a half weeks. I sometimes wish I had the freedom to chase for a couple of months at a time, as some chasers do, but I still have a day job (editing books) and a fun job (writing books) and a husband and dogs and a life at home. So I enjoy the trip, and then I look for lightning when I get back home to Florida.

We saw five or six tornadoes, but most of them were in the “murknadoes” category — far away or difficult to see. The best tornado photo I got was probably a shot of a skinny little thing in Missouri, where I’d never seen a tornado before. And why “or six”? The last one was so murky, it’s super hard to see in my video, even though I think it’s there. All of this is to illustrate why seeing tornadoes is not really the most important thing to me when I chase storms, though I’m still frustrated when I miss them. Especially because our chase crew missed a couple of really photogenic tornadic storms due to bad decisions or poor timing. That’s the way the weather works sometimes and the way chasing works as well. Regardless, we still found beautiful storms to photograph.

One of the best things about this season — my 29th — was getting together with good friends whom we’ve barely seen in the past few years. Chasing together was a huge amount of fun. We hit thirteen states and drove more than 9500 miles, so we packed in a lot of adventure.

Alethea and I did several video updates from the road. You can check them out in this YouTube playlist. I’ll be posting more pictures and videos as I go through everything. I certainly got a lot of photos, and I can’t wait to share them with you. Thanks again to everyone who gave so generously to our gas fund! Stay tuned for more reports as I process all the images.

 

 
Alethea Kontis and I started the 2025 storm chase in a place I’ve rarely chased: Illinois. We’d set out from Florida the day before, and it seemed silly to go all the way west to traditional Tornado Alley when it looked like the best storms might occur in the upper Midwest.

En route, we spotted the town of Metropolis on a map. I may have made a funny comment about Superman. We had no idea that when we stopped for gas, we were stopping in Superman central. The gas station was full of fun Superman stuff, and we headed downtown to a fabulous shop and an an awesome Superman statue. I still wish I’d shot a time-lapse of the beautiful clouds flowing behind it!

From there, we wandered around southern Illinois trying to get into position on a decent storm. The cells were pretty but not particularly powerful. But we saw a lovely supercell and a pretty golden sunset.

 

While Alethea and I bide our time waiting for an optimum departure for the Plains for our Tornado Alley storm chase, Florida’s Space Coast has finally had some rain. It’s been ridiculously dry here, so any rain is welcome. It’s been kind of fun to have lightning to go along with it.

This storm on May 9 wasn’t particularly powerful, and most of the rain slid by my location. But as storm cells merged, their structure evolved in an eerie and spectacular way. I snapped a few photos — see them below. Later, I tried to get lightning but went out a little late for the show.

This storm complex followed another day of storms. I noticed a couple of lightning crawlers as the rain approached May 8 and wondered if I could capture one in slow motion with a GoPro. This video is the result. The high frame rate leads to a lower resolution, so the quality isn’t great. I cropped it as a vertical short because it seemed like the best way to frame it. I’d love to try shooting one of these slow-motion lightning videos at night. It would be even nicer to have a really high-end high-speed camera (like the kind the chasers use in my novel Zap Bang), but you can’t have everything!

Usually, if I get on a great, sparky supercell in the Plains, I prefer to do a time-lapse video. You can see some on my YouTube channel. Please subscribe to get the latest videos as I post them.

Coming soon, I hope: storms in Tornado Alley!

We desperately need rain here on Florida’s Space Coast, and our neighbors got some today. But the storms avoided our house and all our thirsty plants. I didn’t try to chase them until I saw an “electric brain” of a storm sparking offshore, so I headed out to try to snap a few photos.

The thing about Florida storms is that they usually don’t last long, so I didn’t think it would be wise to drive all the way to the beach from the mainland to photograph it. I figured the cell would be dead by then. Instead, I found a spot in Rockledge on the bank of the Indian River Lagoon. There was some cloud clutter in the way, but the storm shot out some pretty nifty bolts regardless.

I was less than prepared. I had to crop the photos because I only brought one wide-angle zoom and the storm was a bit too far away. Obviously, I haven’t readied my gear for the Tornado Alley storm chasing trip yet, but that’s on the agenda this week. My storm-chasing partner Alethea Kontis and I will head out west soon. We’re looking for the next promising system. Stay tuned for more updates!

 
A line of lightning storms moved through the Space Coast tonight ahead of the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket with four civilian astronauts aboard. I was surprised the weather wasn’t an issue, but the rocket went high and south in a hurry. Still, I caught some lightning in the line in my time-exposure shot of the launch. The streak went right through the Big Dipper. Click on the photo to see a larger version in all its glorious detail.

I took this photo from the bank of the Indian River Lagoon in Rockledge, Florida, looking east. That’s the Rockledge city dock in the lower left, where people are holding up their phones to film the launch, and there’s lightning in the lower right. This was one exposure! I took several shots before the launch, thinking I might do a composite later, but no – the lightning cooperated, and I was able to enhance the image to make the bolts more visible.

Here’s one more shot at booster separation – a “jellyfish” effect in the upper right, with lightning in the lower left of the frame. Not as cool as the launch shot, but still pretty neat.

Girls Who Chase is a cool organization that aims to draw attention to women who chase storms and encourage girls to get into weather and the sciences. They also offer classes to folks who want to get into chasing. It was an honor to be featured with Alethea Kontis in their recent “Meet the Chasers” feature. We’re a rather eccentric duo in that, even though Alethea has science in her background and I have a great love of science and wrote about it as a journalist, we’re now writers of books (mostly) in real life. Check out the post to read the entire interview!

We also did a video to accompany the interview, which you can see right here. Thank you for the invitation, Girls Who Chase!

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.