On May 21, Alethea Kontis and I met up with chaser friends in Limon, Colorado, including Jason Persoff, Bill Hark and Jack Beven. This is Jason’s backyard, and he was optimistic that we’d get some “Colorado magic” while sharing his knowledge of the ways of the DCVZ. That’s the Denver Convergence Voriticity Zone that enhances the potential for severe weather in eastern Colorado.

Promising convection northwest of Limon yielded a distant landspout tornado. The storm became severe-warned, and we were off, heading north and then chasing this beast east. Or, at times, being chased.

 

We spent a lot of the day southeast of the aptly named Last Chance, on beautiful, remote farm roads. I think it was Jason who said he didn’t expect to see many chasers out here.

Friends, we saw hundreds of chasers. This is the new way, unfortunately. I know we’re chasers, too. I just wish there weren’t so many of us.

Crowds not only complicate tornado targeting and egress — they make it difficult to escape a hail core when it’s moving over a dirt road with no outlets.

We got into the fringe of this beast’s core and mostly suffered small but unnervingly loud hail as I cursed. A lot. (Edited out of the video.) I was not in the mood to have my car destroyed again, and fortunately, we were able to turn south and get out of the way. Other chasers were not so lucky and experienced extreme damage to windows and car bodies.

 

Meanwhile, the storm was rotating and became tornado-warned. We were with it the whole time, but with the hail and road challenges, we didn’t see a tornado. “Brief” tornadoes were reported. Eh, it wasn’t worth losing windows!

Maybe we didn’t have all the Colorado magic this day, but it was a fun and exciting chase and especially enjoyable with friends.

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

And here’s our update the next day when we talked about the chase.

Sometimes storm chasing is more about travel than storm chasing. Though May 18 — after the extremely frustrating traffic jams of our tornado chase May 17 – did offer chasing.

Alethea Kontis, Jason Persoff and I targeted north-central Kansas. So did hundreds of other storm chasers. And as one storm popped up after another, we were again mired in traffic. The only time the chase was pleasurable was when we dropped off the paved roads and watched one rotating cell – which allegedly produced a tornado after we lost it when, again, we got stuck in traffic. I’m pretty sure three of the storms we chased produced tornadoes we didn’t see – almost entirely because of traffic!

I was ready to throw in the towel on storm chasing by the end of this day. I shot lots of video, but I’m not sure if any of it is worth posting.

We stopped for dinner at a yummy Asian place in Manhattan, Kansas, and let the storms roar over us. Small hail blasted my car just outside the window by our table. When the power went out in the restaurant, the kind staff still delivered our hot food, and we paid in cash on the way out after the worst of the storm had passed. We stopped and said hi to Bill Hark at a truck stop before hitting the road for our respective hotels.

The sky was eerily atmospheric, a kind of burnt orange layered with gray, as we traveled west, knowing our next chase was a couple of days away. We said farewell to Jason via ham radio, hoping we’d catch up with him again later, and continued to our hotel.

 

We allowed ourselves to be distracted multiple times as we meandered southwest the next day. I rescued a turtle outside of Kinsley, Kansas, aka “Midway USA” and the hometown of uber-talented singer-songwriter Freedy Johnston, where we stopped at a museum and got a few shots of the old train engine – the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe 3424.

Alethea had never seen Greensburg’s excellent Big Well Museum (only the gift shop!), so we made that our primary target for the day. The museum tells of the town’s history, including the EF5 tornado that devastated it in 2007. There are several artifacts, including the mangled tornado siren (with my old picture of the water tower and siren on the plaque). The top floor of the round part of the museum features 360 degrees of windows, with verbiage explaining locations old and new – those destroyed by the tornado and new green architecture built in its place.

The spiral staircase at the center of the space descends into the world’s largest hand-dug well, completed in 1888. It was a perfect venue for me to use the GoPro Max2 360 camera. Check out the video. It’s trippy! I love that Escher effect of seeing the top and bottom of the staircase at the same time. And I love the design of this museum, which echoes the tornado and the well and also hints at infinity and the possibilities of renewal.

 

From there, we drove through southwest Kansas, where great swaths of the prairie have been burned black by wildfires. We caught a few dust devils and eventually landed in Amarillo, because every chase trip requires a visit to the Big Texan Steak Ranch if at all possible.

Since the weather was clear, it seemed like a decent night to try to shoot stars at Cadillac Ranch, the beloved art installation on the west side of Amarillo. But the moon was bright, and what was once in the middle of nowhere is becoming surrounded by truck stops and development. (There’s a stargazing scene here in my novel Tornado Pinball – I think it was darker then!)

We figured we’d be targeting Colorado on May 21, so on May 20, we headed north, stopping by the Cimarron Heritage Center in Boise City, Oklahoma. It really felt like Dust Bowl country this year, given how crispy the grass was. Locals hanging out at the gas station were talking about the fires and their dead lawns. These Panhandle towns feel so marginal, as in on the margins, incredible survivors in the face of a brutal environment.

We shot some time-lapse video of Cimmie, the apatosaurus sculpture, with the clouds and headed north into Colorado.

With a whimsical photo stop in Campo, known forever as the symbol of a remote chance paying off big-time thanks to a legendary tornado that happened near there, we aimed for Lamar. A stretched-out storm there had us pausing for a few photos before checking in to the hotel.

I feel bad that we don’t give Cow enough air time, so since we were staying at the Historic Cow Palace – a renovated old hotel that abuts a giant barn space filled with a dining area, other amusements and living tropical plants, with the humidity to go with them – Cow had his own adventure. We also ran into Bill there, so we enjoyed dinner in the unusual venue.

 

I’d noticed a vintage theater downtown. I often try to get quick shots of these as we roll through small towns – there are wonderful old theaters in the Plains, and I’m a movie nut. I wanted to see if the neon was lit now that it was dark. Alethea and I headed out to see. The neon wasn’t on, but the marquee was lit, and the colors were atmospheric as they reflected in the wet street, thanks to the earlier rain.

I love storms, but I also love traveling through the Plains. Heck, I just love being on the road. There’s always something new to discover and experience.

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

 

Hey! In case you haven’t noticed, Alethea Kontis and I are on the road in Tornado Alley. We’ve been chasing storms and seeing fascinating sights along the way. I already have a ton of content to post, but since we are driving CONSTANTLY, there’s not a lot of time to process it – though we are doing our best on the social sites (I recommend Instagram or Facebook). The 360-degree video I shot of a mammatus-filled sky May 17 is absolutely dreamy. I can’t wait to share it.

That said, check out the video feed to see our fun little updates, and please follow me on YouTube. Much more is to come!

Here’s the latest from our updates, and here’s the playlist on YouTube.

And thanks SO MUCH for supporting our gas fund. Alethea has all the links (and perks) here if you’d like to pitch in a couple of bucks.

Onward!

 
May 17 offered a wild storm chase as Alethea and I met up with Jason Persoff and targeted southeast Nebraska. We sort of hoped that the Storm Prediction Center’s bull’s-eye centered in the northeast part of the state would pull more chasers that way, but instead, we ended up mired in the worst storm chaser traffic jam I’ve ever seen — and it cost us.

We waited in St. Paul for a while, watching the clouds develop, then went after a couple of storms popping up east of Ravenna and west of St. Libory. We monitored the developing storms as one became dominant, then repositioned south to get out of the rain and hail. This got us very close to the business end of the storm. We were in position to see the magic of tornadogenesis – but, as it turns out, out of position for what came next.

 

The storm was clearly rotating, and the structure looked chaotic. Its wall cloud was one of the weirder-looking ones I’ve seen, but it was whirling right in front of us. And then a tornado spun up under the spinning column of cloud. From our perspective, it was a rapidly rotating dust whirl moving east. Annoying power lines were in our way, but what a thrill to be so close.

And then, worse for us, a curtain of rain wrapped hard around the tornado with the rear-flank downdraft, smacking us with a wall of wind and water as we jumped into our cars and tried to get east.

 

Surely we could jump ahead of the rain and see the tornado. But wait! We went nowhere fast. We were mired in traffic, and the tornado vanished behind the rain. We had one glimpse of the dark cone before it was lost to us forever.

Chasers who had positioned east and especially northeast of the meso watched the increasingly large, dark tornado (and got into some big hail). But we crept along in a futile slog through the precipitation that blocked our view, stuck in stop-and-go storm chaser traffic. Chase foiled.

Seeing tornadogenesis was fascinating and thrilling, but not getting the payoff of seeing the mature tornado was painful.

Feeling defeated, we paused after a fruitless pursuit on dirt roads, poised to give up. Still, I was intrigued by the radar and wanted to head south and target a storm in the developing line. And along the way, as we headed east on I-80, we were treated to a developing field of mammatus clouds overhead. We had to stop and check them out.

 

These pouchy, smooth clouds are often seen in association with severe storms, under the anvil, and these were particularly stunning, filling the sky. We paused at a rest stop near York, Nebraska, to photograph and film them.

I used a GoPro Max2 360 camera to capture the mammatus on video. Check it out; this is the extended version, more than you’ll see in the video above. It makes me feel like I’m floating through these magical clouds!

I shot lots of photos of the storm and the mammatus, which redeemed our chase day. Click on any image to see a larger photo and start a slide show.

 
May 16 was our first real chase of the 2026 season, and it brought us from Kansas to Colorado and back again.

Our hopes for a splendid isolated supercell weren’t realized, but we bounced between cells in eastern Colorado, eventually getting on the south side of an irregular line of storms. The storm there had a whale’s-mouth appearance and dust under the base as it pushed out an outflow boundary and a couple of gustnadoes.

We experienced the intense winds of the boundary and let it pass. What next? There was little chance of getting east of the most intense part of the line now.

We knew we wanted to go north for the next day’s chase. The question was, which way to go? We could’ve gone straight north and tangled, at least briefly, with the line. Instead, we moved south and east, back into Kansas.

We caught strangely elongated mammatus over Sharon Springs, Kansas, then moved north, eyeing the back side of the storms as they were lit by the setting sun.

 

This was the best part of the day – stunning mammatus over western Kansas wheat fields at sunset. Gorgeous colors, golden light, and a soft stub of a rainbow all made this a magical conclusion to the chase before we headed up into Nebraska, anticipating the next day’s chase.

Click on any photo to see a larger image and start a slide show. I know there are a lot of sunset photos, but you should see how many pretty ones I left out!

 

Storm chasing updates from the road

Videos show our updates before and after today’s chase. We have a whole playlist of these from 2026, and more from 2025.

 

A sunny, windy day on Cocoa Beach provided a beautiful backdrop for the second day of the Air Dot Show on Sunday, April 12. That is, an air show, headlined by the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels.

Huge crowds showed up on the barrier island, concentrated in the main show area in Cocoa Beach. I was at the house of some friends a bit south of that area, but we still had a very cool view from the beach. I shot photos with my Nikon Z8 and a 200-500 zoom lens – an older lens that requires an adapter to work with the Z-mount. It’s also heavy as heck, so my arms got a workout shooting thousands of photos.

Among the other aircraft featured: the B-52 Stratofortress, the F-16, and a plane and helicopters demonstrating refueling in the air from the 920th Rescue Wing. These are some of my favorite images from the day.

Click on any photo to start a slide show of larger images.

I’ve just come back from a dream bucket-list trip to Iceland. Of course, the problem with any “bucket list” item is that you’re supposed to check it off. It’s done. It’s over. But I would love to go back to the dreamy skies and dramatic landscapes, which my husband and I experienced in all of their winter beauty, from snow-frosted black lava rocks to sparkling ice crystals to frozen waterfalls.

My No. 1 sub-item for this bucket-list trip was seeing the Northern Lights. I’ve seen them before from the U.S., during the May 10 and May 11, 2024, solar storm displays when Alethea and I took a detour from storm chasing to find them. While the pictures then showed a lot more colors than what I captured in Iceland, to the naked eye, they weren’t as vivid in terms of actual light. Up near the Arctic Circle — while the color was still somewhat faint — the features of the aurora were very much visible to the naked eye. The lights were almost like eerie self-illuminated clouds.

I saw aurora on multiple nights. We happened to be in Reykjavik when the big geomagnetic storm occurred, just before our tour began. Good news and bad news: We were in Iceland for the big event, but the aurora were competing with the city lights. However, they were spectacular anyway, and I’ll do a separate post about those two nights.

What’s amazing to me is that even if the parameters aren’t particularly promising, this far north, a big show can happen anyway. And that’s what we got on November 15 (into the wee hours of November 16) at Wilderness Center, a remote hotel set on an old farm in east-central Iceland. Framed by a river valley, the display was vivid and came in (at least) three waves. I only gave up because I was freezing and I wanted to go home with all my fingers. (Not really a joke – I think I was a bit frost-nipped.)

Here are some photos from the night, and check out the video as well. It moves from GoPro time-lapses of the early show and then time-lapses from stills shot with my Nikon Z8. I used the intervalometer setting for some of these and just manually shot the last sequence because I was in a hurry and didn’t want to waste time setting it up and miss part of the display. So occasionally there’s a wee bump, but the display was so amazing, I have no complaints.

You can click on any image to see a larger version and view the photos as slides. Stay tuned for more posts from this wonderful trip through a photographer’s paradise!

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.