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 like the South Dakota Badlands and Monument Rocks in Kansas, photographing virga (rain that doesn’t hit the ground) in Texas and exploring Shamrock, Texas (a visit worthy of another post), Alethea Kontis and I found ourselves plunging south beyond Midland on May 16, looking for storms.

A lot of other chasers were out, too, including our friend Daniel Shaw, whom we ran into on the road. It’s hard to miss his Rav4. And, as usual, there were tour groups, too.

I got initiated into storm chasing on the late, great Cloud 9 Tours in 1997. And I know what it’s like. A good tour won’t sit out a marginal day. So even on the iffy days like May 16, there are going to be lots of chasers on the road. There were no traffic jams where we were, though, especially since there were no obvious tornadoes. That night, a wicked storm roared through Houston, but there was no way we were driving that far east anyway.

 

In spite of the so-so setup, we were rewarded with a truly beautiful shelf cloud that reenergized me after several days of tough slogging. Any chase day when I can take a good picture isn’t a day wasted. And this one more than delivered.

Click on any photo to start a slide show.

 

Exclamation points. I know. In two blog headlines in a row. But this was one of those moments that totally deserved exclamation points — May 10 in Kansas and May 11 in South Dakota, where Alethea Kontis and I photographed the Northern Lights. I’m including the video in both posts because it’s fabulous and I don’t want you to miss it! (Exclamation point.)

All the driving had us plumb tuckered, to be honest. We’d chased storms for a couple of days around central Texas in less than ideal territory with less than stellar results, then booked it all the way north to the Hill City area of Kansas to shoot the aurora. We stayed up very late to do so. But the temptation to seize one more night of the geomagnetic storm was strong, and if we could do it in the beautiful Badlands National Park, wouldn’t that be even better? Especially when the skies were more likely to be clear there.

It was a gamble, as all storm chasing is, but we decided to take the risk. Worst case, we’d see lots of lovely country and visit Wall Drug. I drove us up through Nebraska on a blue highway over gorgeous rolling hills with hardly another car in sight. It was an exquisite afternoon. And I had high hopes of good weather in South Dakota, which were realized as the low clouds on the horizon behaved themselves.

We stayed in a motel/RV park right on the edge of Badlands National Park, making access ridiculously easy. We went in before sunset to scout out a shooting spot — other photographers were already staking their claims — and set up to capture the aurora.

The good and bad thing about our spot was that a major park road was nearby. Bad: Headlights sometimes shot into our eyes as cars rounded the curves or overexposed an image. Good: Sometimes the headlights lit up the peaks in the rocks, making the foreground even more dramatic. You can see this effect in at least one photo I’ve shared here.

 

It took a while to get going, and the best of the aurora lasted maybe forty minutes, but it was stunning. And then the moon set and the Milky Way rose and we were awash in stars, probably the most I’ve ever seen at once. We waited a while, dozing a bit in the car, but when the aurora seemed to be asleep, we thought we maybe should be too. Or at least we needed a comfort break. So we drove the few minutes back to the hotel, and Alethea retired for the night.

I thought I saw a persistent hint of aurora on the horizon (wishful thinking?), and I went back out, picking a different spot, in hopes of capturing the Milky Way with the aurora. It was after 3 a.m., and all was quiet in my chosen perch, with the rocks surrounding me like a moonscape.

The Milky Way glowed, but the aurora colors from earlier were barely hints in the sky. Still, a pulsing green beam of light — very faint, so I had to adjust my settings to capture it — crossed swords with the strip of star systems in spectacular fashion. What I could barely see with the eye looked like science fiction in the lens. A friend later suggested it might have been a proton aurora.

By the time I got back to the hotel, there was a different glow on the horizon: hints of pending dawn.

 

This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience … so far. I hope to get to Iceland or Norway or another northern viewing spot soon while the sun is still in an active period so I can see the vivid colors of the aurora with my eyes and not just the camera.

As far as chasing goes, this was one of the best chases of the trip by far.

Roll over images to see captions, or better yet, click one to start a slide show of larger photos.

While the prospect of storms was marginal during the first week of our storm chasing trip, we found ourselves tempted by another type of storm: the powerful magnetic storm predicted for May 10, 2024. I’d never seen the Northern Lights, and it was a bucket list item for me and for Alethea. We were pretty far south in Texas after our chase from the day before, but after looking at the cloud forecast, I figured we could get to a decent viewing spot in northern Kansas. So we drove. As we do.

I suggested an area west of Hill City in northern Kansas, anticipating few clouds and not many lights to interfere with our viewing. The viewing conditions were close to perfect. My only regret was that it didn’t get darker sooner, especially as I saw the amazing shots coming out of Europe.

Someday soon, I want to go farther north — i.e. Iceland or Norway — to see the Northern Lights in their full glory. While we could see the shape of the glows and rays and hints of color, it took long exposures with the camera to see the truly bright colors. I didn’t know the proper terminology, and what I called columns and ribbons were probably rays and arcs. Did it matter? No. The show was absolutely spectacular, and even before darkness was complete, the pink rays were visible to my naked eye.

Our first perch was a farm road in a grid we’d scouted before dark, with a gnarly old tree in the foreground. There were power lines to our south, but I figured that didn’t matter, since I fully expected all the aurora to be to our north. Wrong! The lights flowed overhead and behind us as well, with some of the best colors around 10 p.m. CDT. I removed some of the power lines later in editing so the full glory of the aurora filled the frame without those annoying distractions.

 

We then moved to a hill in the same area, even farther from the small settlements nearby, with no power lines in any direction (a rarity in the Plains; when I’m seeking good spots for photos, I’m always whining and joking, “Why do you need all this electricity?”). At this point the aurora was more tame, but there were still beautiful colors.

Tired, we finally booked a hotel on I-70, but we hadn’t gone far before I caught a new glow in the corner of my eye. I told Alethea I thought it was going off again, and we pulled into another farm road, facing north. There was no fancy foreground, though I loved the dirt road stretching north into the curtains of light as the aurora exploded again. My best shots from this wave were after 1 a.m. CDT on May 11, and again, the aurora stretched overhead, even producing the corona effect.

 

Check out the video showing both this show and the aurora from the following night, when we took a chance and headed to Badlands National Park in South Dakota. You can see the Badlands aurora photos here — with the addition of the spectacular Milky Way.

Roll over images to see captions, or get the full experience and click one to start a slide show of larger photos.

As the video title says, sometimes storm chasing isn’t pretty. Stuff happens. You lose cellular data. You get out of position. You get more out of position when the road turns into a one-way construction zone where a guy with a portable stop sign holds you hostage for twenty minutes while you wait for a pilot car. Add in murky skies, sight-blocking hills and trees, and few or bad roads, and the experience can be less than ideal.

That more or less sums up our chases on May 8 and 9, 2024, as Alethea and I wandered in central Texas. We got a few pretty photos anyway, but I was frustrated. Still, maybe the video will make you chuckle.

Roll over images to see captions, or click on any image to start a slide show.

The Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Oklahoma is one of my favorite stops when we have a break during storm chasing. To have a break on the second day of chasing didn’t bode all that well, but who cares? Prairie dogs always cheer me up.

So I was really sad to hear that my favorite prairie dog colony had vanished. (See the adorable 2022 video here.) A woman at the information desk at the visitor center told me that they could have up and moved overnight, especially if they didn’t feel safe (not surprising given the yahoos we saw throwing food at them and making lots of noise when we visited two years ago), or they could have been felled by disease. I prefer to imagine them packing their tiny suitcases and making a run for it. We did see prairie dogs elsewhere in the park, but they were farther away and more skittish. Alas.

 

Still, this is a beautiful place and well worth a visit. We didn’t even go to the top of Mount Scott this time, just a favorite overlook and other easily accessible areas, and we had a fun close encounter with a mini herd of bison who trekked right by my car. And the wildflowers were fabulous.

Here are a few photos from our visit May 7. Roll over any one to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show.

Even when you set aside a month in which your window for chasing storms seems flexible and endless, you can miss stuff, and boy, did we miss stuff the week before we headed to the Plains for the 2024 chase. It didn’t help that I had work obligations and my chase co-pilot Alethea Kontis made a whirlwind trip to South Korea. And thus we missed a week of epic tornadoes. But May 6 looked promising, so we headed out from Florida to catch the action — even if it looked like the action would die off soon afterward.

I’m writing this later, so I can say we totally redeemed the season as we extended our trip into a third week. But there were ups and downs, and it all started with an ominous forecast on May 6 for Oklahoma. As the Storm Prediction Center summarized its “high risk” outlook, “A regional outbreak of severe weather with multiple intense (EF3+), long-tracked tornadoes, as well as very large hail and severe thunderstorm gusts, is expected over parts of the south-central Plains from this afternoon through evening.”

They weren’t exactly wrong. There were tornadoes, including one before dark, wrapped in rain, that some storm chasers saw. But most of the tornadoes were after dark, including a terrible one in the Bartlesville area. Yet this wasn’t a day of many rampaging tornadoes, fortunately for Oklahoma, and we didn’t see one.

 

That doesn’t mean we weren’t concerned about the day as it began, as you can see in the video. But instead of a high-stress chase, what we got was classic rotating storms forming on the dryline in the Texas Panhandle and pushing into Oklahoma. They weren’t moving all that fast, and we had a satisfying chase as we observed pretty convection and tried to pick the right cell. And after dark, we were treated to a beautiful lightning show.

Roll over images to see captions, and click on any one to start a slide show.

I keep hearing blogs are dead, unless they’re so full of searchable content that they’re not. Mine has been quiet for a while, and there are reasons for that.

While I occasionally opine about writing and I love to share my photos, I mostly use the Sky Diary blog as a kind of archive so I can remember and relive my storm chases over the years. But real life often gets in the way of my record-keeping. I still have a bunch of old files on my legacy storm-chasing site that haven’t migrated over here yet. And 2023 – well, I managed to post just one of my Tornado Alley chases with Alethea Kontis from last year DURING last year.

 

Part of the issue is that when you’re chasing, you’re driving. And driving. And driving. And maybe eating subpar snacks and forecasting a little. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a few hours of sleep after dumping all my photo cards each night and backing everything up. It takes forever. And when I get home, I have to catch up with reality all over again.

So on the eve of chasing storms in 2024 — after missing a historic outbreak — I thought it might be time to catch up on my storm reports a bit. I’ll be posting a few fantastic 2023 chases under 2023 in the blog sequence (backdating them). Feel free to browse and see what you might find. The first one is up: a dazzling lightning-producing storm in New Mexico on May 25, 2023.

What have I been doing, if I’m so slow to post my chase photos? One, I have a day job editing books and creating book covers. Two, I’ve thrown almost all of my “extra” energy into writing new mysteries under my pen name and trying to grow the audience for those. Three, hubby and I are occasionally traveling now that the worst of the pandemic is over, and four, I have family obligations that take a bite out of my schedule.

And we have crazy dogs. Did I mention dogs?

Storm chasing has been a long and twisty road. It’s changed. So have I. As life gets more complicated, why do I keep doing it?

Perspective after almost three decades of chasing

I remember a time when I dreamed of integrating storm chasing into every part of my life, of being in the inner circle, of “making the grade” and earning some kind of gold star of recognition. I felt like I had something to prove, I guess. I haven’t fully achieved any of those things, for good reasons, it turns out, one of them being that sometimes those shiny things are worth less than you think.

But I chase. And storms did work their way into much of my life, elevating my photography and inspiring my Storm Seekers Series of novels. Storm chasing is a huge part of my identity still.

Back when I got hooked on chasing, I applied for jobs in Tornado Alley, which would have been a big move for me as a lifetime East Coaster. In the end, I compromised and took a job in Florida, figuring at least there’d be lightning storms. But I still had a “real job” in newspapers, and I wasn’t willing to make the sacrifices some chasers make — going into significant debt, living in their cars. I mean, I am IMPRESSED by that dedication. I just don’t have the constitution to endure the hardships. And there’s so much life to taste, to quote a song. I want to chase storms and do a lot more before my time runs out.

And now I have a life on the East Coast that means I’ll probably never live just a few hours’ drive from targets in the Alley, which means I’m going to continue to miss huge events like last week’s tornadoes unless I can somehow afford to — or desire to — shed a lot of the other things I do.

At this point — 2024 marks my 28th season — I’ve missed way more events than I’ve caught. But I’ve caught some incredible ones.

A hard lesson to learn if you’re really obsessed with storms is that you will NOT see everything. Sometimes you’ll even be on the right storm and not see the tornado, and it hurts. I still sting over some of my misses, but life is short, and you have to decide if you want to balance other priorities with the thrill of chasing.

Caveat: “Thrill” is not a great word to use, because it’s associated with an adrenaline rush, with courting danger, with “zero metering” (getting into a tornado, which I’ll never do intentionally). Adrenaline happens, of course, and so do mistakes, but the thrill for me is capturing nature’s spectacles along with the freedom of roving the country and going wherever the weather is. Seeing old friends is a huge part of chasing for me, too. And if I can capture beautiful structure, I don’t even care that much if I don’t see the tornado.

 

The sky still calls, and so does the art

Video has been totally devalued, so “getting the shot” is more for my satisfaction than for my occasional video sales (I’m not averse to sales, mind you!). And now YouTube has stripped monetization from my videos because I don’t get enough traffic. Not that I ever earned much. So I’m still trying to fund my passion, fund the art – sell photos (you can see some at Stolen Butter Gallery), sell books, and share beautiful things that people like. (You can Buy Me a Coffee with the links on this site if you enjoy my content.)

Some people say content is free, but you have to be able to afford to make it, or the only thing we’ll see is reductive AI iterations of storms and stories. And who wants that? So the struggle goes on.

Given chasing is rarely a fortune-making endeavor, it comes down to: Why do I chase? Still?

The wonder. The satisfaction of nailing a forecast. The exploration. I mentioned the freedom. And photography still drives me when I chase storms. My sensibility has evolved from a journalistic viewpoint to more of an artistic one.

When you’re “running and gunning” with stills and video, there’s extra challenge to framing a meaningful shot. Sometimes you just want to document the moment. And that’s OK. But when an opportunity presents itself to say more, you have to recognize it and take it.

That artistic quest, finding meaning in the moment, will never stop challenging me. And it’s another reason I keep going back to Tornado Alley.

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Keep up with our chases on my Sky Diary page and on social media. Follow me on YouTube, Instagram, and the Funnel Vision page on Facebook.

It’s been months since I photographed a rocket launch, even though we’ve had a lot of them here on the Space Coast. I’ve been busy working and also writing books (under my pen name). There’s only so much time in the day … or the year. Which is almost over. But I couldn’t resist checking out the SpaceX Heavy launch and booster return on a beautiful evening … followed by another SpaceX launch, a Falcon 9 carrying more Starlink satellites.

My framing was a bit off for the Heavy launch, meaning the returning boosters can be seen just at the right edge of the composite image. Both images were shot on the edge of the Indian River Lagoon in Rockledge in slightly different locations. I wanted to include the pretty boat lit up for the holidays. The only disappointment is that from this angle, I couldn’t get the moon in the launch shot with my 12-24mm lens.

When I saw a big line of storms approaching the east coast of Florida with lots of lightning on June 19, I figured I could get into position to photograph it. But Act I of the chase was disappointing. I parked at the St. Johns River west of Cocoa and photographed the line coming in. Just about all the lightning was in the clouds. I caught the shelf cloud, then as the rain hit, I scurried east and holed up at home with the scared dogs while it pounded over us.

But as the line was passing, I noticed a flash out our back door and thought, lightning crawlers? It was worth a try.

I missed one or two amazing crawlers, like fireworks across the sky, as I tried to get set up along the Indian River Lagoon in Rockledge. Just when I was about to give up hope, a dazzling lightning crawler exploded across the sky from horizon to horizon. A quick preview of the shot showed it might be overexposed – this was a seriously bright bolt for a crawler. Fortunately, with a slight exposure adjustment in editing, it looked fantastic!

I got a few more crawlers, none quite as spectacular. I moved to near Rockledge High School as more rain moved in. Now I shot from within my car to stay sort of dry (the camera still got wet; I had to wipe the lens frequently) and to stay safer. And in spite of the rain, I caught several more lovely lightning crawlers. Just before midnight, I headed home. This was the best lightning I’d seen on the Space Coast in a long time.

When do you see crawlers? In my experience, it’s usually late in the storm cycle, as severe storms have lost some of their power but are still electrified. Patience is essential, as great crawlers can occur several minutes apart. Crawlers can be intracloud (within one storm) or intercloud (between storm clouds). Some folks call it sheet lightning, spider lightning, streak lightning or heat lightning, a colloquial term also used for diffuse flashes caused by a storm that’s too far away to be seen.

Roll over an image to see a caption, or click on any photo to start a slide show.

On the last day of our 2023 chase in the Plains, Alethea Kontis and I headed back to New Mexico for one more try. We watched clouds bubble up from infancy to make pretty little storms west of Tatum before abandoning those for a severe storm near Portales. It was rotating but not serious about doing anything, and soon the storms started to merge.

 

We booked east into Texas, trying to stay ahead of them – and then to get a view as a large arcus cloud formed. It wasn’t a layered shelf cloud, but it was dramatic, filling the sky.

After photographing an eerie orange sunset under a bank of dark purple clouds, we dropped to I-10, where the intensifying storms laid down a barrage of lightning bolts. The timelapse video is pretty darn cool. From there, it was south to Fort Stockton, chasing lightning all the way, with a final stop at the town’s road runner statue. In all, it was an epic end to our voyage to Tornado Alley.

Roll over images to see captions, and click on any one to start a slide show.