On May 26, 2014, Peggy Willenberg and I hopped east to Stanton, Texas, from our starting point in Midland to keep an eye on developing storms.

We ran into friends there, including Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland, Robert Balogh, John Mann, Anemometer Steve Barabas, and The Weather Network’s Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal and Michel Millaire, whom we met on and off all day.

What a swoosh in this storm!

We targeted a storm to the northwest and chased it for a while, then switched to a storm developing behind it. It was a day of stunning structure and rotating features, some of them dusty, and while many of these spinups were reported as tornadoes, we didn’t see any tornado I’d hang on the wall of fame.

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It’s hard to keep up with the web while on the road, but today was my fourth day chasing storms in Tornado Alley. Peggy Willenberg of the Twister Sisters and I have been traveling since Saturday from the east coast, and we saw some beautiful storms in the northern Plains earlier this week.

Catch up on all the chases on my 2014 storm reports page on SkyDiary.com. More updates are in the works. You can see where I am during active storm chases on the map on the tracking page. And please follow me on Twitter for the latest!

 
On May 21, 2014, Peggy Willenberg and I moved southwest from our starting point in Sterling, Colorado, to get into position in front of a cell coming out of the Denver area, where a brief tornado was reported near the airport. (There were many tornadoes reported today, but this is the only one that’s yielded convincing video that I’ve seen so far.)

We got in front of the storm north of Bennett and watched it make a serious effort at organizing as it spun.

We followed it east, watching the rotation and staying ahead of the hail. It was a beautiful storm, especially with the green light that suggested how much hail it held.

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On May 20, 2014, Peggy Willenberg and I shot south from the Nebraska panhandle into central Colorado, driving hard to get into position in front of a cell coming out of the Denver area.

We got in front of the storm around Last Chance and were rewarded with a spinning storm that made frequent wall clouds but could never quite produce a tornado, though it was tornado-warned as it passed over Burlington. Instead, we saw some hot lightning from the town.

 

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On May 19, 2014, Peggy Willenberg and I finally got into the range of chaseable storms after driving for two days from South Carolina to begin our storm chase.

When we reached the Nebraska panhandle, prospects didn’t look great for severe storms, and near Scottsbluff, we watched several small cells pop up and die as they moved northeast out of Wyoming. But patience was rewarded as we finally got a gorgeous UFO-like supercell, complete with hail, blowing tumbleweeds, lightning and a mothership structure.

The lightning was accompanied by sparkling stars. You can see the railroad tracks in the foreground.

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I’m waiting for the right time to go storm chasing – perhaps as soon as the coming week – and working on “Zap Bang,” the third novel in the Storm Seekers trilogy. Here’s a teaser for you – a book trailer. If this were a movie, this would be the action trailer, which would be accompanied by a softer trailer that shows the humor and relationships between the characters. Unfortunately, the latter would require actors and a big-time Hollywood production. So until there’s a movie, ahem, here you go – the dark, dramatic side of “Zap Bang.”

Want to know more? Here’s the working summary of the novel, which is the sequel to “Funnel Vision” and “Tornado Pinball”:

The Storm Seekers trilogy concludes with a new storm-chasing adventure, “Zap Bang.” Expert storm chaser Jack Andreas is called to join a lightning study that will put him in the path of the tornado – and into the secretive world of pilot Maribeth Lisbon, tasked with flying a converted warplane into the zap zone. They intersect with Jack’s undeservedly famous nemesis Brad Treat and down-on-his-luck adventurer Aurelius Zane as the two men host a show that’s trying to get a young couple married in front of a twister. The antics of the TV chasers, the lightning experiment’s eccentric benefactor and a food-truck-driving mystic lead to dangerous complications, as Jack and Maribeth find their most arduous challenge may lie within.

By the way, I think “the zap zone” is to “Zap Bang” what “the suck zone” was to “Twister.” R.I.P. Dusty.

Stay tuned for details on the novel. Look on the upper right of the page to subscribe to blog posts by e-mail to get all the latest storm-chasing reports and book news.

I had a pretty frustrating storm chase today – just a quick one in between work I’m doing on a video project, a book edit and photo shoots – as I tried to intercept a beautiful shelf cloud ahead of a line of severe storms. I just couldn’t get in front of it in position to take a good photo and ended up driving in a huge circle in Brevard County, Florida, in intense rain and wind. My persistence paid off in a slightly less spectacular but moody photo of the tail end of the shelf, near the southern end of Patrick Air Force Base. See the rest of the photos here.

I thought I had plenty of time to catch a dawdling line of storms parked over central Florida, but as it strengthened, it accelerated, and I was overtaken by the beautiful shelf cloud I was so desperately trying to catch.

I had to settle for a weaker tail-end shot after a lot of frustrating driving in the severe storm – nature’s car wash – and a video malfunction that was likely human error. Sigh. But the view from the beach was pretty.

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There’s a swans’ nest in nearby Viera, Florida, that has had spectators gawking for weeks. Its enormous size and spectacular and doting parents were plenty of attraction, until the baby swans were hatched on Friday.

Swans mate for life, barring disaster, and these parents seemed at least as devoted as all the fans crowding around the bank of the retention pond with their cameras and cell phones. Of course, one idiot drove by today screaming “F*** swans,” but there’s no accounting for poor taste. The swans were tolerant of their fan club, though one informed participant warned us that they have teeth in those elegant beaks, and a bite can be quite painful.

As you might guess, the three-day-old cygnets are adorable. Still, their neighbor, a great blue heron, was not impressed.

 

 

It felt good to slap the dash-cam mount on the dashboard, pop in a video camera and go on a real storm chase today, in the middle of a tornado watch, no less. I ran out in such a hurry that I will have to reconfigure the dash-cam mount later, but that’s OK. There was a line of intense, tornado-warned storms rampaging across central Florida with a distinct bow on radar, and I got in the way of one of the warned circulations on S.R. 520 northwest of Cocoa and south of 528. I’ve seen plenty of gust fronts, but this one had an amazing leading edge that created a tornado-like optical illusion for a few moments. It’s too bad I was in heavy rain at the time, or I would have had more photos of it, but I got a few, and they’re in my Sky Diary storm-chasing report for March 29. There’s also a video, which I have posted here, too.

Late last March, I got to chase a great squall line event, too. These kinds of Florida storms are good warm-ups for my Tornado Alley trip, when I get to learn all over again how to juggle cameras, radar, navigation and driving while trying to capture the storms of the Great Plains. I expect to head out in May and will be posting regular updates. I’m happy to note that I’m again among several storm chasers with whom Midland is partnering to show off the capabilities of its cameras. New this year is the XTC-400 HD Wearable Video Camera. I’m looking forward to trying it out, hopefully on a mothership supercell! Wide-angle lenses do amazing things to mothership supercells.