Chris Kridler
Chris Kridler is a writer, photographer and storm chaser and author of the Storm Seekers Series of storm-chasing adventures.
Chris Kridler is a writer, photographer and storm chaser and author of the Storm Seekers Series of storm-chasing adventures.
I really don’t love chasing storms traveling at highway speeds, especially when they’re packed with hail. I’m hail-avoidant on a good day, thanks to previous experiences with being pummeled by hail, and with a new car? Well, perhaps I’m even more cautious.
So when Alethea Kontis and I traveled south of Limon, Colorado, on May 23, 2021, to meet a rotating storm hurtling north, we had to make a decision. And personally, I didn’t want to try to keep up while playing dodgeball with what was quickly becoming a line of hail-filled storms. Some folks saw tornadoes who pursued it. Some didn’t. And some took a hail bath while they were chasing it.
A few crawlers lit up the night.
We opted to try to catch storms forecast to form farther east, but those storms were never that vigorous or organized in spite of screaming-fast surface winds. Still, we saw a funnel at the end of the original line, and I wondered if there was any circulation on the ground.
The day was redeemed by a fantastic lightning show at Burlington, Colorado. The timelapse in the video is really nifty.
Roll over a photo to see its caption, or click on an image to start a slide show of larger pictures.
We shot some photos looking toward Courthouse and Jail Rock in western Nebraska.
We started and ended the day in Sidney, Nebraska, and any storms that formed were screaming north at highway speeds. It was almost impossible to keep up with them. Perhaps the only highlight was seeing some of the pretty rock formations of western Nebraska silhouetted against the storm-tempered light.
I do have a few photos from the day. Roll over one to see its caption, or click on one to see a slide show of larger images.
The biggest hail we saw was about three inches across.
May 20, 2021, Alethea Kontis and I targeted northeastern Colorado, hoping for supercells. Bill Hark joined us for much of the chase. Storms took a long time to get going, and when they did, the lack of roads made it difficult to be on the “right” side of them … but we had a beautiful view of hail and rainbows (or hailbows) from the west.
We also picked up some very large hail on the road, up to three inches in diameter — hail I was very grateful not to drive through.
Roll over a photo to see its caption, or click on one to start a slide show of larger images.
After a hearty diner breakfast with friends in Lubbock, Texas, near the Buddy Holly Center, where we checked out a few of the outdoor exhibits, Alethea Kontis and I decided to check out the chance of a storm southwest of us. And there was a storm, which we caught up with near the town of Loop.
A funnel cloud spun slowly under the base. A tornado spinup was reported somewhere around this time, but we could not see the dust whirl.
This was a slow-burning cell, kicking up dust and roiling underneath. It slowly began to spin and became severe-warned, and it was clear from the radar it was producing a lot of hail, which we had to stay ahead of. We saw gustnadoes and later funnel clouds about the time a brief tornado was reported, though we didn’t see the dust whirl.
By the end of the day, the storm attained a beautiful, laminar appearance at sunset. We photographed it while hanging out with the cows and later drove through the lightning on the way to our hotel. For a marginal day, it was a fun chase.
Roll over a photo to see the caption, or click on one to start a slide show of larger images.
Jason Persoff found us by the side of the road. He was chasing with his son Kai, and we all headed north of town to watch the developing storms.
What a beautiful storm.
The first ones seemed to deflate quickly, but soon a small LP (low-precipitation) storm began to dominate the area around Brownfield. While a nice cone tornado occurred in the line of storms farther south, this one produced what was essentially a dust whirl under a nub of a funnel. Even though we were filming it, we didn’t see the whirling dust – probably because there was so much other dust in the way.
There’s a lot of timelapse in my video, and this spinning storm sometimes resembled a UFO descending upon the Earth.
The brown fields of Brownfield reflected their color on the base of the storm.
Brownfield literally has a lot of brown fields, and interestingly, their color was reflected in the bases of the storms. So while I always enhance photographs to a point — I’m leaning more toward artistic photos these days rather than the flat, documentary style — those brown and rust colors are pretty much true to life.
As we got into Lubbock, with the tornado sirens blaring, this funnel almost made it to the ground.
The storm moved into the south side of Lubbock and produced a long, white funnel that was just shy of stirring up circulation on the ground — i.e., no tornado.
We watched the storm as it became disorganized but still produced a glorious display of convection, lightning and mammatus clouds at sunset. All in all, it was an exhilarating chase day with lots of photo opportunities.
Roll over a photo to see a caption or click on one to start a slide show of larger images.
The storm turned a delicate pink at sunset.
The storm didn’t produce another tornado, but it was uniquely beautiful, especially with the mammatus, which slid away as dusk fell.
One thing that stays true about storm chasing, even in my twenty-fifth season (yes, you read that right), is that it’s really hard to get enough sleep on the road, let alone enough time to publish all the photos and videos I shoot. We drive constantly, and there’s not a lot of time to sit at a computer for hours processing photos and video. To be brutally honest, I still have some chases for which I’ve never posted the photos in previous years. And this year, though I am doing my best to stay current, I’ve already fallen behind. So although I’m writing this on May 20, I’m dating this post May 16, 2021, which is the day the event occurred.
May 15, Alethea Kontis and I started the day in Shamrock, Texas, with a visit to the Route 66 landmark U Drop Inn, which we’d photographed the night before. And I learned that Elvis ate there once!
We headed north and west from there, aiming for the western Oklahoma panhandle, with the idea that we could go north into Colorado or catch a storm right there … even though there are precious few roads.
After we hung around Boise City, Oklahoma, in the panhandle for much of the afternoon, storms started to form on the high ground from New Mexico up to Colorado. We could see moisture advecting into our area and storms began to form here, too, in loose clusters. We popped north of the border into Colorado as the lightning began to heat up, photographing hail and rain shafts and the occasional bolt.
There was wonderful lightning in the storm.
Soon enough, we dropped back south into Oklahoma and stayed ahead of the barely moving storms, capturing the structure and lightning. Especially appealing for photography are all the derelict structures in this area, evoking the hard times of the Dust Bowl. They’re so appealing, storm chasers were parked in front of most of them, but we got a few atmospheric photos anyway.
Roll over the images to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show of larger photos.
Storm chasing 2021 has begun! This is my 25th season chasing storms, though last spring was the first I spent no time in Tornado Alley, thanks to the pandemic. While the world is far from normal, my friend Alethea Kontis and I are vaccinated, taking precautions and on the road.
Today, May 14, was the first taste of a chase for us this season after driving out from Florida. We paused to take photos of golden wheat and a wind farm at Oklaunion, Texas, and kept an eye on storms in the Texas Panhandle.
We caught a little lightning in Shamrock, Texas, home of the beautifully restored Route 66 landmark U Drop Inn. While I’m still hoping to get a truly great lightning photo here someday, this fun little timelapse video and the photos were atmospheric, at least.
I’m already sleep deprived. More later! Meanwhile, you can roll over each image below to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show of larger images.
On Florida’s Space Coast, we like to say rockets get out of here in a hurry. This GoPro “nightlapse” timelapse makes the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 with Starlink satellites on April 28, 2021, appear to be REALLY fast. In retrospect, it would’ve been nice if the trees weren’t in the way, but the challenge of launch photography is knowing where the rocket is going to come up, especially if you’re shooting from a new location. Yes, you can sort of figure it out, but it’s still possible to be just a little bit off.
It was a really windy night, so the palm trees were blurred in my photos. The moon was just beyond full, so it showed up nicely in the fisheye photo.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 launches from Cape Canaveral with Starlink communications satellites on April 28, 2021. Photo by Chris Kridler, ChrisKridler.com
In this picture, I played around with stacking just a few photos. That’s the streak shot here with the nice blue background and really short star trails.
A fisheye lens shot of the SpaceX launch as seen along the Indian River Lagoon.
Here’s the photo I shot with my 10.5mm fisheye lens. This is one long exposure – 257 seconds – featuring the launch on one side and the moon on the other. I cropped it a little to get the strong horizontal shape.
In this streak shot, the SpaceX Falcon 9 shot right up out of my frame.
The predawn launch was perfectly timed for lovely light effects as the capsule and the booster it shed (which subsequently landed on the drone ship) headed to the horizon in parallel. The contrail left a swirl of noctilucent cloud in the early morning sky.
This is the second crew launched to the ISS aboard a Falcon 9. NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, along with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet, will spend six months aboard the space station.
There’s also new hardware aboard the capsule, including science experiments.
GoPro timelapse video (in nightlapse mode) and photographs shot with two Nikon cameras are featured in the video. You can see some of the photographs in the gallery below.
Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.