Our storm chasing target on May 25, 2025, was the Texas Panhandle, which meant we were able to swing by one of my favorite Route 66 stops, the U Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas. Jason Persoff took the opportunity to shoot another “album cover” of our chase crew in front of the old gas station.

We continued south, expecting storms to go up early and line out early. But we were in for a treat – not one but two spinning supercells and an incredible lightning show.

We headed south and west out of Childress. Soon we were east of Matador along with a bunch of other chasers, watching a developing supercell to our west. Structure and radar indicated it had rotation, and it cranked up into monster mode. Hailstones up to 6 inches in diameter were reported with this storm!

 

We all got separated during the chase, which often happens, especially since Alethea and I tend to get farther out in front to capture the structure (and avoid the hordes and hail). We got some nice structure shots ahead of the storm, along with a few cows in the foreground. And I spotted what looked like a possible tornado near Afton, though we were quite distant from it – it was reported by another chaser. Yet even our friends who were closer weren’t sure of what they saw.

 

And in spite of our best intentions, we ended up in a slow-moving traffic jam anyway as the hail core munched toward us. We successfully evaded it after a few tense minutes and moved farther south to chase another storm near Stamford. This photogenic supercell prompted more tornado reports. There was certainly visible rotation from our position and, even more terrifying, some of the most intense lightning I’ve ever seen.

 

I stood outside the car for short time, shooting branchy cloud-to-ground bolts with no lightning trigger, using exposures of just under a second to maximize my chances. I caught several bolts before the rapid-fire barrage scared me enough to return to the car.

We stayed with the storm (or storms) for a while. Later, our party said goodbye to the northern chasers under lightning crawlers on an isolated road. What a way to end a spectacular day!

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

 
After a disappointing chase the day before, our crew focused on a target in Oklahoma on May 24, 2025. We hung out in Seiling for a while, then moved on to a storm near Putnam.

It was a leisurely chase as we caught up to the storm and watched it develop. The sun shot out beams behind the updraft. But as the storm wasn’t doing much and the sun was setting, we aimed for another one near Strong City.

This storm was a lively lightning producer, and it was fun grabbing a couple of time-lapses as I shot stills. Check out the video. I love a chase day that ends with a good lightning storm.

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We got a few good photos on May 23. Normally that’s enough to make me happy with a chase. But our crew’s chase into Colorado was sharply painful after unfortunate choices had us missing two tornadoes.

We knew our northern target was the most promising for tornadoes, but it was a haul, and getting there in time would be nearly impossible. Then we were tempted by the nice storms going up farther south, and we stopped in Kirk to check them out.

 

The issue, of course, is that the storms moving into Colorado from Wyoming were pretty far away, and a tornado occurred in our original target area while we were looking at the storms farther south. Members of our crew liked the idea that the storm might produce again, as cyclic supercells often do. Though I worried as we left behind the increasingly beautiful cluster of storms.

The northern storm was still spinning but weakening by the time we arrived. It had nice structure, but it became clear it wasn’t going to produce another tornado.

We turned around, but we were too late again. The storms to the south produced a tornado. We’d missed both and still had hours to drive to our Kansas hotel for the night. It was an 800-mile-plus day for very little return.

 

Chasing is like that sometimes, but it can be frustrating. I try to learn lessons. One is the same one I’ve heard for years – never leave a rotating storm. Another is: Listen to your little voice.

I’d also like to learn how to fail with grace, but as I said in our chase update the next day with Alethea, I’m still working on it. Failure is a big part of storm chasing. And it’s good to remember that even a bad day chasing is a good day.

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Are there good-luck foods when we chase storms? Alethea and I like to toast with the cheese rounds I make and bring from home. But I also think Texas-shaped waffles are fun, at the very least, and I love a good Allsup’s burrito to fuel the chase. We had both of these on May 22, 2025. And a very lucky storm.

With our chaser friends — Jason Persoff, Scott McPartland, Dave Lewison and George Kourounis — we headed to an area west of Dallas, Texas, and caught up to an unassuming storm that soon began to spin. It was a bit frothy-looking at first, but soon it developed a mini mothership appearance, and the striations and stacked plates became smoother and more pronounced as the day wore on.

We got fantastic pictures with the sun shooting out rays behind the storm when we stopped on the northeast side of Possum Kingdom Lake. Then we had to circumnavigate the LP, or low-precipitation, supercell, catching up to it at Palo Pinto.

This amazing spinning supercell and a profusion of colorful wildflowers made for a visual feast and one of the most beautiful chases of our trip.

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The best part about chasing, especially when the storms let you down, is hanging out with friends. By May 19, 2025, Alethea and I had met up with Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland, George Kourounis and Jason Persoff. After a yummy barbecue lunch in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, we headed south toward the Red River, where a storm headed over the border into Texas, dumping huge hail along the way.

 

We avoided the hail and ended up getting our best views from behind the storm as it moved west. A spectacular anvil with pouchy mammatus caught the sunset light, so we stopped near athletic fields in Ardmore to get some shots.

The puddles offered a great opportunity for reflective photography as the colors got more dramatic. Then they shifted and changed and became more muted as the sun sank below the horizon and the storm moved off to the east. The nice sunset photos were our consolation prize after a somewhat frustrating chase.

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Maybe I should have taken the pancake printer as an omen.

The pancake printer is just one of many breakfast phenomena one encounters in Tornado Alley hotels, and it’s probably better than the make-your-own-waffle machines in terms of safety and mess. But waffle machines can do shapes, and I have yet to see a pancake in the shape of Texas.

Still, I named a fictional Kansas town Pancake in my Storm Seekers novels. And southern Kansas was where our troupe headed first on May 18, 2025, positioning ourselves between two storm targets. Which, my friends, is almost always an error – or at least it is if you hang out too long, waiting for things to happen, leaving you far from both targets should one of them fire.

 

But we did have fun at the Casey’s in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where lots of storm chasers had gathered. There were so many amusing cars and cool license plates (see the video). It was a major chaser convergence.

Finally, when a nice storm formed along the dryline southwest of us in Oklahoma, we went after it, but we were already too late. It spawned a tornado we didn’t see, then weakened.

Still, it had lovely structure at sunset, and I got a couple of decent photos, which I consider the mark of a good day. It might not have been a great one, but that’s the way storm chasing rolls sometimes.

To start a slide show of the photos, click on any one below.

Alethea and I had a target of eastern Missouri in mind May 16. We met up with friends in Chester, Illinois: Dave Lewison, George Kourounis and Scott McPartland. We crossed the river to intercept a line of storms coming toward us. Soon, the tail-end Charlie looked quite promising on radar. And along the way, we saw spectacular mammatus above us.

The land is pretty flat in much of this area, but trees offered a challenge to viewing. South of Zadock, Alethea and I found a clearing and watched the storm approach. It showed signs of rotation but no obvious tornado at this time – 3:37 p.m. We watched the storm go past us and tried to reposition.

Then we got on Route 57 to reposition – a tactical mistake as we headed east, given we couldn’t get off the divided highway when we DID see a tornado! We spotted it through the trees west of Bertrand, Missouri, at 5:14 p.m. Alethea caught a bit of it on video as I drove.

But the show wasn’t over yet. We moved north to pursue other storms and stopped at Morley. While I eyed a wall cloud, the storm produced a tornado south of Oran in a different part of the storm that took us by surprise. Conveniently, right in front of us. Ha! It was a very pretty, slender funnel that produced a dust whirl on the ground.

Afterward, our attention turned to a fat rotating wall cloud moving to our northeast. Partially obscured by rain, a white tornado formed. I got shots around 6:46 p.m. CDT. The storms sped away from us, so we stopped to enjoy sunset west of Bell City, Missouri.

It was time to reposition to Tornado Alley. We made our way west through Missouri and the dark skies of the Mark Twain National Forest. We couldn’t resist stopping to try to capture the stars and possibly sprites above the storms. Instead, I caught fireflies and possibly a touch of the aurora reported that night. We also saw an eerie white shaft of light that cut across the sky. There was initial speculation the next day that it was a “STEVE” space weather phenomenon, but we learned that the effect came from a spacecraft. The upper stage of a Chinese rocket performed a fuel dump after a launch.

There’s always magic if you keep looking up.

Here’s a gallery of photos from the day. Click on any one to start a slide show of larger 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!