Post updated in August 2026.

Let me be absolutely clear: I trashed the original post I wrote here in 2023 and rewrote it in 2026. Because a lot has changed since AI seemed like just a curiosity.

Which seems like yesterday.

And this post will immediately be out of date given the way we’re hurtling into the future, so buckle up.

“Do you use AI?” This is the question being asked of, well, everyone right now. Especially writers. More on that in a minute.

My short answer: I do not use generative AI to write books or design book covers.

But because AI has permeated just about everything, sometimes I’m not even sure if I’m using it in everyday life. Are you? It’s the first result in search engines (though you can set Google to start without it). It’s integrated into apps to an absurd degree. Some helpful photo editing tools (such as those that de-noise images) may or may not be AI, and I appreciate those tools. (And using Photoshop in and of itself, or using a digital program like Procreate to draw on my iPad, is not equivalent to using AI, as some folks online seem to think.)

AI is also implemented in silly and unnecessary ways in just about everything.

No doubt it has its uses. I have occasionally consulted ChatGPT as kind of a search engine on steroids. And then I checked what it told me, because it makes things up.

If AI can help diagnose diseases or write software, that sounds good, right? Some writers and others are using it in innovative ways to analyze ads and write marketing copy.

But is it worth using all of our natural resources to make the future of AI possible? For instance, by 2030, greenhouse gases emitted by data centers will comprise about 40 percent of what the United States produces in a year, according to Morgan Stanley. (And yes, climate change is happening, folks.)

According to Cornell, unchecked AI use would consume water equivalent to the annual household usage of 6 million to 10 million Americans. A conversation of 20 to 50 questions with ChatGPT consumes half a liter of fresh water. And the power needs of data centers are flabbergasting. (Read more of the details and documentation for this information here.)

As an added extra bonus, AI is also making us more stupid.

AI isn’t altogether “slop” now. It’s become quite good at producing serviceable images and copy, but it depresses me to see it everywhere, on book covers, in marketing, in AI-authored books, and so on.

And I hate posting a real storm video and then seeing a laughable AI version with twenty rainbows and other fakery, with commenters exclaiming about how amazing nature is and the “creators” earning clicks and financial gain from their fraud.

When AI was a novelty — and before I truly understood the extent of how art and writing were scraped and stolen without creators’ permission to teach these models — I played with the Wombo Dream AI app. I enjoyed iterating my own ideas, created a few marketing images, made virtual “collector cards” for my characters, and simply had fun with it. I stopped using it once I learned more about how the work of creators was stolen and scraped to teach various AI models.

And now, along with 300,000 other writers, I’m a party to the Anthropic copyright lawsuit over its use of pirated books — including mine — to teach its AI.

There are reasons people are upset about the prolific use of AI. But the dark side of the AI backlash is the sometimes ridiculous witch hunts that social media vigilantes and some press are waging against writers, using notoriously unreliable AI tools like Pangram. There’s a reason so many books are flagged as using significant amounts of AI content. It’s because THE AI MODELS TRAINED ON OUR BOOKS. And our websites, including this one.

There are so many questions about what artificial intelligence means to us now and what it will mean in the future. There are some terrifying projections, honestly. And seeing an Open AI agent escape its sandbox recently and hack another AI company, Hugging Face – blasting past law and convention in blind pursuit of an insignificant objective — might offer a preview of what sentient AIs will do to humans to achieve their goals.

I’m a techie kind of geek. I love great tools that work. But I worry that these tools have too much baggage for us to use them without drastic consequences unless we take stock, make them sustainable, and put up more guardrails.

This thought applies to a lot of things in life: Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

 

Today was the second day in a row I got to enjoy a shelf cloud and strong storm (today’s was severe) as it swept through the Space Coast.

Even better, we got a lot of rain. My parched plants, after several rainless, extremely hot days, seemed to breathe a sigh of relief – except for the palm tree that shed multiple fronds in the strong winds that blasted us today. Maybe it enjoyed the haircut.

This is a “short”/reel video, hence the annoying vertical format, but it seemed like a good way to share the highlights of the storm on my Instagram (if you’d like to follow me) and YouTube channel (ditto, please).

Yesterday’s storm (on July 12) was ominous and dumped nearly two inches of rain at our house, according to my unscientific rain gauge. (I really need a scientific rain gauge so I can report more accurately.) Anyway, it was quite impressive as I stepped out of the grocery store.
 

 

Today’s storm — on July 13 — earned a severe warning from the National Weather Service. It had beautiful structure as it moved across the Space Coast. Shelf clouds tend to mature and get prettier as they slide east to the beaches, but even on the mainland, where I caught it (or it caught me), it was gorgeous.

 

 

And of course, this storm packed strong winds, some of the strongest I’ve seen in a fast-moving storm. Since I was outside (of course), I was blasted by small debris. Even had to rinse out my eyes because of the barrage of grit.

And those aforementioned palm fronds, which you can see flying in the video, are all over our yard.

The dogs weren’t very happy with the lightning and thunder. But we’ll take whatever break we can get from this summer’s oppressive heat.

 

I haven’t done much in the way of storm chasing this summer, at least not yet. I’ve caught shelf clouds moving through our neighborhood. One even approached as I caught the bat flight out of our neighborhood bat box, which has become two boxes. The new one is supposed to lure the bats out of the old one, which is falling apart. After less than two weeks, it sure had attracted a lot of bats, as you can see in the video.

I caught more cloud iridescence on July 4 as well. As the sun slipped behind the towering storms to our west, the wispy caps of those storms lit up like a prism, making what some people call “cloud rainbows.” Diffraction causes water droplets or ice crystals to scatter light and make these colors.

 

While I’m often checking radar, and we’ve had a few gully-washers here on Florida’s Space Coast, unfortunately, there hasn’t been a lot of lightning at night. At least not within reasonable striking distance, so to speak.

The thing about Florida storms is they don’t last the way supercells in Tornado Alley do. They go up and down in about thirty minutes. So when I see nice lightning on my radar app and note it will take an hour to drive to a good vantage point for photography, I often give up before I ever set out. And of course, I don’t chase storms full-time. I’m busy working and don’t have the luxury of setting up for the daily sea breeze collision, alas.

 

Still, after the lightning had been cooking for a while Wednesday night, I noticed the storms were persistent and thought I’d give it a shot. I stopped at a spot on the St. Johns River west of Cocoa, Florida, and got a few shots, including this one. The lightning seemed too far away, thought I love the moody wide shot with the stars overhead (some detail is lost at low resolution, but click on the photo to see a larger version).

I tried to get closer but realized most of the lightning was buried in rain. So I headed back east, stopping once more at the river to try to capture the looming outflow feature. It wasn’t quite as pretty as the earlier stuff, but I loved standing there in the quiet with the frogs chirping and the water occasionally sloshing. Alligators, maybe. The mosquitoes were less romantic, but it was still lovely to take a moment and enjoy the peace of nature.

Click on any of the following images to see a larger version and caption.

 

We knew May 31 was likely to be the last day of our 2026 storm chase in Tornado Alley. We also knew it was likely to be a late show in southeast Kansas, perhaps at sunset or later. So after doing our laundry in Kearney, Nebraska, we dropped south and stopped at the World’s Largest Ball of Twine. As one does.

This beloved tourist attraction is the pride of Cawker City, Kansas, and Alethea and I have both added twine to the ball. Sisal twine, to be exact. If you happen to run into Belle of the Ball Linda Clover there, she can help you do a turn around the sisal sphere with the big spool and make it even larger.

Linda told us all about her recent challenges. I’ll respect her privacy and not get into them here. But let’s just say she’s an amazing and resilient woman, and I’m glad she gave us a few minutes of her time before we hit the road again. (Oh, and the water tower in Cawker City is now painted to look like a ball of twine, which is delightful.)

Off to the chase!

While our target was roughly south of Emporia, early storms in a mostly blue sky suckered us farther south toward the Oklahoma border. When our first cell died with a whimper, I just about gave up hope but figured we’d better head toward our original target, given there were clouds in the area.

As we headed north, we found ourselves scrambling to get into position as the towers grew. We had to navigate an annoying detour in the process.

 

Then, as the sun set, a supercell exploded north of us (in spite of my skepticism!). The last rays of the day set it aflame in brilliant orange. We paused for a couple of photos, then pressed on. I was worried we’d miss a tornado early in the storm’s development; we weren’t yet close enough for my liking.

As twilight set in, we got our first look at the cell’s prodigious lightning. The trick was getting close enough to get detailed shots of the bolts but stopping far enough away to stay out of the rain and maybe get some structure, too. Oh, and avoid hills and trees that would block our view.

We found a spot south of Madison, Kansas, and after reassuring the lovely homeowner whose driveway we parked alongside that we were not the same hooligans whom the cops hauled off to jail from that location recently, we were able to settle in and shoot a breathtaking lightning show.

 

I set up my 360 camera to do a time-lapse video – in hindsight, I might have set it up in a slightly different place, but regardless, the video is fantastic. With the 360, I can edit and export clips at a variety of widths and angles, and I used several views in the video. Do check it out.

I could watch this over and over again. Why? This was one of the most dazzling lightning shows I’ve ever seen, with nearly constant bolts from the first storm and another cell right behind it as the complex moved east.

What made the photos especially magical was the addition of lingering light from the west and the glow of a full moon rising in the east, both of which added dimension to the pretty supercell as it positively hammered the landscape with lightning.

Adding to the magic, there were fireflies winking around us. In a few of my shots, you can see the lightning bugs. They look like sparkles in some of the video (watch the ground).

And then there was a tornado warning. We weren’t super close to the updraft base. I was getting wide shots with the Nikon. So we didn’t see it in real time. But later, when I checked my stills, I was shocked (pun intended) to see a white tornado under the base of the storm framed by two lightning bolts.

O.M.G.! Lightning AND a tornado!

 

This was the catch of a lifetime. Except what’s really funny is that there were so many chasers on this storm, I know of at least three others who got an almost identical shot. Another got a close-up of the tornado lit by lightning without the bolts. There were probably more such shots. We were in very good company.

We’d had a pretty good chase overall in the Alley this season, but until this point, we hadn’t had exquisite supercell structure or a long-lasting tornado, one of those true “days to remember.” That’s one of the hazards of chasing for less than three weeks (as opposed to three-plus months, as some lucky chasers do). Even if you do chase for months, you miss things. Regardless, this storm gave us a lot of what I’d been craving: classic structure, a spectacular lightning show, a very cool tornado photo, and the chance to just hang out by the side of the road for an hour and a half and simply enjoy nature’s fireworks.

There’s so much driving in storm chasing. Obviously. But the best moments for me are when you can stop and really drink in a fantastic storm — when strategic positioning, luck, and storm speed and development cooperate. This was such a night.

Eventually, the sparks slowed down and the storms became less isolated. It was late, and we had a long trip ahead to Tulsa. So we gathered our gear and headed south.

I saw so many deer on the side of the road, I didn’t rush this stressful drive. But the high of seeing the stupendous storm helped carry me into the wee hours to our destination and a much-earned rest.

Click on any photo to see a larger image and start a slide show.

 
Here’s the video update we made from the road about this day and a stop in Memphis – where we saw hot lightning – on our trip home.

 

May 30 was another day of chasing scraps — and being in the vicinity of a tornado but not actually seeing it.

Alethea and I chased with Jason, heading into Nebraska and following one storm after another. We got separated, and Alethea and I had the pleasure of being gassed by a farmer near Imperial who, without warning, sprayed us and some other chasers with fungicide (at least I think that’s what it was based on the markings on the tank) as we were parked at the edge of a field. And yes, he had plenty of time to tell us to get lost beforehand. I’d just thought the tractor looked cool against the stormy sky. How naive I was.

Most of the people we meet in the Plains are so nice. But there’s always the occasional serial killer, so watch out.

Anyway, we were still breathing, barely, so we fled and watched those storms die — one formed a high-based funnel that twisted into oblivion — and then we headed north and east to meet up with Jason near Hayes Center.

 

There was gorgeous, hard convection north of us that made for a very pretty picture. Jason got some drone shots.

We repositioned to get closer, and one storm near Wellfleet produced the tornado. It also produced reported 3.5-inch hail. We found thoroughly melted 2-inch hail at the side of the road. So while we avoided the big chunks of ice, we also missed the tornado.

Still, we saw some incredible structure … a tilted updraft rippling with mammatus clouds.

 

At Lake Maloney, south of North Platte, the storm to the north produced some lightning but none that played for my camera. It was still light out, but we attempted to pursue the lightning into the night. I caught a couple of bolts, nothing exciting, and then we parted ways. Jason planned to chase on his way home, and we knew we had one more chase left.

It was a bittersweet farewell. We saw so few of our friends this year. And not to get too melancholy, but there aren’t that many years left.

What we didn’t know is how amazing the next chase would be, in a totally unexpected way.

Click on any photo to see a larger image and start a slide show.

 

On May 29, 2026, Alethea Kontis and I headed east out of Denver with Jason Persoff, hoping to catch landspouts and maybe lightning in Colorado. But the Colorado storms were lackluster, and the chase pulled us into Kansas.

At the border, we paused in Kansas, looked west and watched a line of storms gusting out, complete with what looked like twin gustnadoes. And then we headed east to the next target.

 

Near Levant, the sun lit up hail shafts under the storms, even making a brief and colorful hailbow. Meanwhile, storms produced outflow boundaries, and one heading toward us blew up a dramatic line.

We hastened to catch up and get ahead of it before we were doused with rain — and while it was still pretty. We headed north until the road turned to dirt and had a few minutes of a glorious view before the rain overtook us.

 

We chose separate photo ops as we moved south, then east. And then another circle was in store as we eyed multiple updrafts and rain shafts in the advancing line.

The storms moved off to the north, so Alethea and I stopped by an apocalyptic junkyard on the edge of Colby to take pictures. And then we found a more pastoral setting, a field full of cows, as we photographed a sunset in golds and blues.

 

It was a day of chasing scraps, but we had some lovely moments.

Click on any photo to see a larger image and start a slide show.

 
On May 27, we woke up at our cute vintage hotel in Santa Fe, enjoyed their lovely fresh breakfast and wrote some postcards, then headed north toward Colorado and Great Sand Dunes National Park.

We made a stop in Taos for an oil change and a quick spin around the touristy downtown. As we headed north, I loved the gorgeous drive along the Rio Grande and through the wide open valley along Colorado 169 (with, incidentially, almost no cell service). It was clear why this area draws stargazers. I only hoped we would get some clear skies for photography.

 

After checking in at our hotel near the edge of the national park at Mosca, Colorado, we headed into the park. We did some preliminary exploring, seeing mostly deer and RVs, then parked and joined the throngs of other tourists walking out onto the sand. Some had boogie boards for riding the dunes (which felt wrong for a national park, but since the sand keeps moving, I suppose no harm done). Some folks had dogs. Some were prepping for overnight camping. And some were just walking and fighting the wind, as we were.

We didn’t get too far into the dunes given the tough slogging and our late visit, but it was enough to get a feel for them. It was strange, really, being surrounded by these steep peaks of dark sand in a totally unexpected place – on the east side of a valley, up against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

 

The dunes’ formation began about 400,000 years ago. The valley filled with sediment. Melting glaciers filled the valley with streams and lakes that deposited the sand. Prevailing winds pushed the sands up against the mountain range. After more glaciers and more melting, and with no trees and bushes to stop them, the dunes moved across the valley. As winds also flowed down off the mountains, as well as from the west, the sand and dunes were pushed higher and higher. And all of a sudden, we have the set for Lawrence of Arabia. (Not really, it just looks like that.) You can see all this action animated in a National Park Service video.

In the spring, Medano Creek usually flows along the edges of the dunes, so a shallow water crossing is required. But we had no water to cross – just a bit of a sandblasting in the wind.

 

I was tasked with waking up later at moonset – though I or the Internet was off by at least an hour – to see if the clouds had cleared enough to show us stars. I deemed it close enough and had to wake up Alethea. So we headed into the park again. The moon was declining toward its bed but hadn’t gotten there yet, and the light and wispy clouds and haze made astrophotography challenging.

Eventually, though, it got dark enough that we saw the Milky Way arcing overhead. And my star photos were full of the streaks of satellites.

There’s no place that’s truly void of technology, I guess. But this is a great place to see stars if you get a nice clear, moonless night.

We stopped in the park once more in the daytime, made the de rigueur raid on the gift shop, recorded a video update and hit the road for eastern Colorado and a meetup with Jason and his family.

We crawled up to the Royal Gorge, balked at the admission prices and looked at it from the parking lot, then twisted on east to Denver through the wonderful mountains. Why do I live in the subtropical flats again?

 

We ended the evening with great friends, great steak, and a subtly stormy twilight … and plans to chase storms tomorrow.

Click on any photo to see a larger image and start a slide show.

 
Minor weather, or no weather, forces storm chasers to be creative when we don’t have a quick commute home. But sometimes those quiet days yield magical moments.

On May 24, Alethea and I followed a sun halo to Liberal, Kansas. Sun halos seem to follow us around – or perhaps we’re just extra sensitive to them. I’m always looking for these rings of light caused by refraction in ice crystals in cirrus clouds. Halos can form around the sun or the moon and may be accompanied by other kinds of “rainbow” arcs. We saw one over Mount Rushmore in 2022, and I’ve seen them on the east and west coasts of Florida.

The Land of Oz in Liberal offered fun foregrounds for this sun halo. I shot a time-lapse as the fluff from the cottonwood trees floated through the air against the blue sky, catching the light like fairy dust. And then we moved on to Garden City, Kansas, and photographed clouds over a peaceful wheat field before capturing a stunning sunset near Satanta as the birds sang.

I made a video of all of this set to some very chill music. It’s the kind of thing I’ll watch when I can’t take the stress of everyday life, which, these days, is most of the time. A video doesn’t hold the same transporting power of actually storm chasing and being immersed in nature, but it helps.

The next day, May 25, seemed marginal for storms, but I hoped we might see some as we wandered into New Mexico, going the long way to reposition for a planned chase in southwest Texas the next day.

We’ve enjoyed visiting Tee Pee (Or TePee) Curios in Tucumcari in the past. It’s a great Route 66 landmark with lots of cool, kitschy souvenirs. So we headed that way as the clouds built.

The shop folk were kind enough to turn on the neon for a few minutes so I could get pictures as the sky darkened with clouds. As we emerged from the shop, the storms were roiling and spitting out lightning, and we got doused with rain. Still, there wasn’t a ton of structure, so we headed east, since we had reservations in Odessa that night.

The lightning was so intense, we couldn’t resist stopping to check it out, coming back west a bit on Route 66 at San Jon. The Mother Road parallels I-40 there. We had almost no traffic to contend with, and the lightning was fantastic! We spent some time photographing the sparky show and caught a ton of bolts.

I wasn’t using a lightning trigger, just shooting almost continuously with my Nikon – and I filmed the storms with my phone, too. We even caught a couple of CGs with the Route 66 sign, to my delight. I stacked six exposures to show several of the bolts I shot from the middle of the road in a short period of time.

 

The next morning, we reckoned with the forecast, which looked bleak – with storms much more distant than expected – and decided to forget the Texas plan and head north into New Mexico so we could travel to Great Sand Dunes National Park the following day.

We couldn’t resist a stop in Roswell, where another excellent sun halo was accompanied by a circumhorizontal arc. Great alien vibes!

We drove through a heavy storm near Ramon after stopping for a few photos, then followed the fading halo north, pausing a couple of times south of Santa Fe to take more pictures. I do love the Land of Enchantment. And it was fun to visit Santa Fe, however briefly.

I also think any day I can get a good photo is a good one, and we had three days of satisfying photography.

Click on any photo to see a larger image and start a slide show.

 
This was our chase update from the road on May 24 as we shot that beautiful sunset.
 

 
The morning of May 23 had Alethea Kontis and I switching from one Best Western to another in Amarillo because of the total disregard of a lobby clerk who wanted to charge us more than the online rate for staying another night – even if I volunteered to make the reservation online. She clearly had zero interest in making our stay a happy one. It was all extremely stupid and made even more hilarious by her shirt featuring a character saying, “You’re confused? I’m f**** confused, bro.” But I like getting the points, so we moved across town. Such is the nomadic life.

We had a productive day otherwise – filming a chase update and running errands, among them buying weed-trimmer line to try to clean out the drain tubes for my car’s sunroof. Why? The carpets in the CR-V were soaked! I’d ruled out the AC drain as the source of the leak and, through some googling and talking to my Honda guy at home, concluded a blocked sunroof drain was the culprit. There are four drains, and only the front two were accessible, so I could only hope I got out the clog. Unfortunately, the floors remained wet for the rest of the trip.

NB: I didn’t want a sunroof when I bought this car. But to get this “trim” of the Honda CR-V, I had to accept the sunroof that came with it. This is why I have a hail shield on my roof. All that said, I really hope I can get a nice car next time without a sunroof. Honda, are you listening?

As the day progressed, we kept an eye on the chance for storms in the afternoon. We eventually met up with Bill Hark and headed north toward Dumas in the northwest Texas Panhandle.

 

West of town, about 6:30 p.m. CDT, we intercepted a line of storms on the verge of a gust-out. As oblivious cows eyed us nervously, we watched the line of storms approach, kicking up dust as it went. And then the haboob chase was on!

It was seriously challenging to stay ahead of this beast. We paused briefly on the edge of town, then navigated out (briefly stymied by a closed railroad crossing) and south, and got far enough ahead to stop for photos. I was worried we wouldn’t be able to get anything, but the danger of stopping too soon was that we’d be overtaken by the dust.

We had just a few minutes to capture the incoming haboob. It was like something out of a movie – a jagged wall of brown dust roiling forward under the undulating jaws of the blue-green storm. It swept over the gold-flecked landscape like an angry wave.

 

And then we were moving again. A couple of cells that popped ahead of this storm seemed to disrupt the haboob effect, but the line kept crashing southeast toward Amarillo. I wanted to intercept it in a photogenic spot.

We navigated to Slug Bug Ranch along I-40, which is kind of like Cadillac Ranch, only a lot easier to get to. It’s situated in front of the Big Texan’s RV campground and includes, along with other upended vehicles stuck in the ground, graffiti-covered VW bugs that used to reside outside a derelict gas station in Conway. I’d photographed them there, too.

Other than the big, bright and visually disruptive streetlamps, this colorful installation made a cool foreground for photos and video of the incoming storm. Abandoned tech meets vibrant art meets the violent beauty of nature … I loved it.

 

After the worst of the dust blew through, we moved to a gas station and enjoyed a barrage of small hail, then met Bill for tasty Asian food to end the day, not all that far from our hotel.

It’s a true gentleman’s chase (as Bill sometimes calls those rare convenient storm chases) when you end up back where you started – and where you’re staying.

Click on any photo to see a larger image and start a slide show.

 
On May 22, we started a fun Texas Panhandle chase by picking up Allsup’s burritos in Dalhart. Bill Hark joined Alethea Kontis and me for this delicious snack, while Jack Beven somehow missed our stop. Maybe he was avoiding the burritos. Regardless, we all caught up and proceeded to the Littlefield area north of Lubbock.

We watched a storm or storms — it was all pretty messy — and observed the beauty of a train moving over the Plains under a turbulent sky. But this storm wasn’t all we hoped.

 

We headed east, thinking we might go up to Plainview, where a landspout had been reported. But we were distracted by a small cumulus tower with hard convection northwest of Abernathy. Alethea and I agreed we should stop and get a time-lapse of it in the absence of a great storm.

This turned out to be a fateful and fortunate decision, as the next hour would reveal. We were surrounded by storms, each with its own agenda, and the atmosphere was about to lend a hand.

Not only did we have the gorgeous convection to the east; a storm to the west was spitting out dust whirls and then … “Dudes!” A landspout. A nice one. We watched it churn for several minutes.

Jack observed that the storm to the north also had intriguing structure.

By this time, storms all around us were spitting out outflow boundaries, created by cool air pushing out from a storm. They look like moving lines on a radar loop. In Florida, they often manifest as shelf clouds. Sometimes an outflow boundary will help kill a storm, or sometimes it will enhance shear, increase rotation and help produce a tornado.

The storm to our north, which had already attracted our attention with its mesocyclonic features, now seemed a likely target. So we headed north about two miles on the same dirt road to observe as these boundaries swept through our position.

 

The dusty tendrils under the base soon showed signs of rotation. We weren’t sure if we were seeing another landspout or maybe a gustnado, but the spinning dust grew. We were watching a baby tornado!

I tend to give more attention to shooting stills than video these days, but this instance is a good example of why I find filming storms so valuable. When I reviewed the footage, I realized we’d seen a multivortex tornado before I even knew what was happening. Even the dusty tornado that evolved, which from our angle wasn’t immediately obvious, was much more visible on video.

Rain began to pelt us and the wind kicked up, so we decided to reposition. This was another one of those situations where, if we’d been more east than south of the tornado, we would’ve had a better view. We were driving alongside a “dust wedge,” as I jokingly called it — a dusty tornado. It wasn’t particularly strong, but it was impressive!

 

I was glad I angled my phone out the window as I drove. I was paying attention to the road, and phone video isn’t of the quality I’d like, but the video captures the essence of the beast. My screen shot from the video had blocky pixellation, so I did some editing in Photoshop to try to smooth out the sky. Consider this an impressionistic but accurate depiction of the tornado.

As I saw a smaller funnel emerging from the cloud of dust — what was left of the tornado — I called out on the radio, and we stopped to watch. But we were being pounded by rain, in poor visibility, as the tornado moved south-southwest and died before it got to us. The best part of the show was over, just like that. But what an unexpected thrill!

Here’s a map showing our route. Click on the image to see a larger version.

You can see the National Weather Service’s report on the day here.

We ended the day at the Big Texan in Amarillo, meeting up with chasers Jennifer Mitchell and Jason Foster, to enjoy the traditional post-tornado steak. And the roaming singers played a funny version of “Margaritaville” for us, since most of us came from Florida. If you live in Florida, you can’t escape Margaritaville, even when you’re in Texas.

Click on any image to see a larger version and start a slide show.

 
And check out our chase update from the next day, in which we talk about this chase.