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.
![After the storms pushed mostly offshore, they left in their wake an incredible lightning crawler show. This was shot from Rockledge, looking over the Indian River Lagoon.](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/061923rocklightning-4-900x600.jpg)
After the storms pushed mostly offshore, they left in their wake an incredible lightning crawler show. This was shot from Rockledge, looking over the Indian River Lagoon.
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!
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/061923rocklightning-7-900x599.jpg)
Lightning the night of June 19, 2023, shot by Rockledge High School.
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.
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/060323nmtx-10-900x600.jpg)
What a pretty pursuer. The rainy season made the wildflowers explode in color.
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.
Our chase season has been the domain of New Mexico, no doubt about it. And today we explored the arid southeast corner of the state and the adjacent area of Texas, which was a lot less arid as the day went on thanks to flooding.
We skipped from Kermit, Texas, up to Jal, New Mexico, watching developing clouds while knowing the better chance of a tornado was farther south. We just didn’t have the heart to chase in that territory and took our chances. And the storm we followed came pretty close. It had a rotating wall cloud as it crossed the highway, and then it enrobed itself in rain and hail and moved east into an area with no roads at all. So much for that.
![We dashed north and caught this rotating wall cloud.](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/060223jalnmtotx-4-900x600.jpg)
We dashed north and caught this rotating wall cloud.
So we repositioned east and filmed beautiful if linear storms and, eventually, a rainbow after driving through the flooded town of Seminole, Texas. Even on marginal days like this, it’s satisfying to see the sky at work.
Roll over images to see captions, and click on any one to start a slide show.
Maybe it was a longing to chase in more “traditional” parts of Tornado Alley after so much time in New Mexico, or just to spend a little time in Kansas, but we drove on up through Kansas from Liberal to southern Nebraska to chase a pretty little low-precipitation storm on May 29, 2023.
![Mammatus over the tiny base of the storm and curious cows west of Trenton, Nebraska.](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/052923nelp-10-900x503.jpg)
Mammatus over the tiny base of the storm and curious cows west of Trenton, Nebraska.
It wasn’t much. But the scenery was beautiful, and the cows were amusing. And we’re hard-core, I guess!
Roll over images to see captions, and click on any one to start a slide show.
Storm chasers traditionally have a steak after seeing a tornado. If you have time. The irony is, when you’re busy chasing, you don’t have a ton of time to stop at a steak house or even an Applebee’s. So sometimes, you end up anticipating the tornado with a steak in advance. Especially if you stop at The Big Texan in Amarillo.
That’s where Alethea Kontis, Jason Persoff and I had lunch on May 28, 2023. Jason was happy with his chase the day before and didn’t plan on going out, so we said farewell after lunch, and Alethea and I went in search of storms. Chances weren’t high of a tornado, but what followed was an extraordinary sequence of events that culminated in a tornado and a powerful, highly structured supercell in the Texas Panhandle.
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/052823txtornadoday-22-900x600.jpg)
Beautiful structure evolved in the storm.
We aimed for initiation and watched a few clouds grow into a shower and then a lovely spinning storm, which we followed until it dropped some hail and headed off into unreachable territory … even as more storms formed to the west on what seemed to be a boundary. Were they forming west or moving west? Or both? The storm motion seemed cockeyed, but we kept on a storm whose persistent rotation drew us closer … and then we spotted the tornado. It persisted for a while, a white cone whose wispy point danced sinuously on the ground southeast of Stratford, Texas.
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/052823txtornadoday-25-900x675.jpg)
The tornado southeast of Stratford, Texas.
I thought another area of rotation was going to be the next tornado, but the stars didn’t align; if it did happen, we didn’t see it. But we got in front of the storm, which became a massive, layered behemoth sending out sparks of lightning as the sun began to set.
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/052823txtornadoday-38-900x600.jpg)
What a beauty!
With storms now coming at us from the north and west, we elected to move south and avoid the pincer maneuver while getting a few more shots. What a stunning storm!
Click on any image to see captions and start a slide show.
May 26 and 27 continued the theme of 2023: storm chasing in New Mexico. Specifically, chasing in and out and around Clovis, whose radar site was unfortunately down.
Alethea Kontis and I met up with Jason Persoff and saw pretty but unambitious storms on May 26 that petered out early. May 27 was more promising and brought us around in multiple circles as we chased rotating supercells. It was really a beautiful day of desert and flood and spectacular skies, as the video shows. We made a couple of stops by a gorgeous old church in Taiban that one chaser after another visited to get a few shots.
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/052723nmstorms-4-900x600.jpg)
Back to the church, with a supercell in the distance.
We also had to ford a flooded road, which was tested by some guys in a much bigger vehicle than ours, and then Jason, before we took the plunge, so to speak. The water wasn’t moving, and we got through it with no trouble. In an area with a lot more roads, we might not have tried it. But given the huge distances one had to drive in any detour, going through seemed the best option.
So with spinning storms and spinning chasers, we dizzily ended the day with a pretty sunset and a few lightning bolts. And I had to get a few shots of The Big Lebowski murals on the walls of the Clovis bowling alley. Dude!
Roll over images to see captions, and click on any image to start a slide show.
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/052523nmstorms-4-300x200.jpg)
We stopped in Tucumcari, New Mexico, to check out the old Route 66 landmarks. Tee Pee Curios is super cool.
We’d seen a beautiful, dusty supercell the previous day and ended up in Amarillo. We headed west toward New Mexico, not expecting much, and played around in the strip of cool vintage Retro 66 landmarks in Tucumcari. Tee Pee Curios is amazing and filled with wonderful goodies.
Speaking for myself, I was out of practice in the Chaser Patience department. We considered giving up, though I wanted to hedge our bets and stop and do some timelapses of the clouds just east of the Texas border.
The sky was gorgeous, and finally, storms initiated in the Land of Enchantment. So it was back over the border, where we were greeted by a towering anvil filled with mammatus over one of a couple of storms that had formed. As afternoon turned to evening, one became spectacularly dominant, a layered, spinning supercell spitting out almost constant lightning. The video is absolutely magical.
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/052523nmstorms-15-900x600.jpg)
A sparky lightning show ensued.
The bad news: Wind blew over my tripod with one of my Nikons on board, damaging my favorite wide-angle lens. I’d had the 12-24mm for years and didn’t realize that night that it wasn’t working correctly after its plummet to the earth, so I had issues with soft focus on the later photos I took of the supercell. Drat! I’m writing this almost a year later; the lens has been replaced. But the rest of the trip meant being very judicious about focusing if I used that lens, or I just used another lens.
Click on any image to start a slide show.
It took a while for Alethea Kontis and I to “pull the trigger” on this year’s storm-chasing trip. That’s what my chaser friends who don’t live in Tornado Alley say when they’re planning to hit the road. For most of us, with jobs and families and other things that keep us busy, we can’t do a lot of spur-of-the-moment thousand-mile trips. It’s better to block out a week or two and maximize our time on the road.
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/052423nmstorms-22-900x600.jpg)
A view of the inflow features.
The pattern didn’t look fantastic, but I thought there was potential around the periphery of the ridge. And we were rewarded with many beautiful storms, all of which I will eventually post on the blog. This was the first one we chased, on May 24, starting eastern New Mexico and working its way east into Texas after dark.
We saw the potential even as we left Florida, and I was determined that we would chase this day if we could get there. It was a long haul, and we got on the storms a bit late, so our position wasn’t great to see the tornado our friend Jason Persoff saw. And a later tornado was seen by chasers who didn’t mind driving into the heart of the beast. I don’t have much stomach for core-chasing, so we stayed back and were treated to gorgeous, dramatic structure.
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/052423nmstorms-33-900x581.jpg)
As darkness fell, this dusty storm got extremely sparky.
The storm turned into a dust-eating UFO after dark as it moved into the Texas Panhandle, and we got hypnotic lightning shots and timelapses before the chase was done.
Roll over any photo to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show.
23 May 2022: Recounting the tornado chase of a massive beast of a supercell in Texas, one year later
It’s been almost a year since the May 23, 2022, chase in Texas that was both awesome and maddening. Alethea Kontis and I were on the storm of the day from the moment it was a piddly shower. But the wrong move put us on the wrong side of a wall of dust that obscured a massive, violent tornado.
This is the one storm from 2022 that I didn’t post last year as I worked through all of my photos … maybe because it was so epic. Or maybe because we didn’t see exactly what we wanted to see.
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/052322mortontxcell-22.jpg)
Tornadic supercell near Morton, Texas.
We hung out in Muleshoe, first, and learned a bit about mules (see the video). Then we saw a sun halo, one of many we saw in 2022. We weren’t sure if we should take it as a good sign, however, given how weak our chase trip had been thus far. But we targeted Morton – later the site of the wedge tornado – and not far from there, eyed a growing but unimpressive supercell. When it appeared a dusty outflow boundary would overtake the storm, it seemed like it might be in trouble. Even though in the back of my mind, I thought of Florida’s outflow boundaries and how they can make a storm spin up a tornado, I couldn’t imagine what followed. Jason Persoff (with whom we’d met up) and Alethea and I began a repositioning maneuver in the wrong direction, and then the storm went nuts.
This time we moved with the dust back toward the storm. And I confess, I wasn’t ready to dive-bomb into the core to see what was on the other side. What was clear is that there was a big tornado in there, but we didn’t have the fantastic view the chasers who hung out among the falling giant hailstones had. Yet we did have a view of the monster. As the power lines sang an eerie tune in the inflow winds, we watched it get closer and decided to see if we could get into a position where we had a view of the supercell’s base. And maybe a tornado.
!["Supercell Skyscraper" by Chris Kridler](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/052322mortontxcell-32-467x700.jpg)
"Supercell Skyscraper" – A dusty beast of a spinning tornadic supercell looms over west Texas on May 23, 2002. Prints available at StolenButter.com. Photo © Chris Kridler, ChrisKridler.com
We bailed on the conga line of storm chasers – so many chasers – and dropped south to get a tremendous view of the stacked supercell. My favorite image of this I call “Texas Skyscraper,” and it’s available at Stolen Butter Gallery.
After Alethea had to get medieval on the sovereign of a local gas station to let us fill up – they were trying to close because of the storm, even though they were safely out of the path and we were running on fumes – we pursued the cell into its lightning phase. It was very difficult to keep up, and eventually we let it slip off into the darkness, a wild runaway in the night.
![](https://www.chriskridler.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/052322mortontxcell-33.jpg)
The storm was a prolific lightning producer.
Some chasers had close calls that went along with their fantastic view of this storm. Check out Pecos Hank Schyma’s harrowing video. I’ve done a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking in the wake of this chase, but it’s hard to come up with a perfect scenario even if I could relive the day.
This storm pretty much wrapped up our 2022 chase season. At least it was a real storm – a powerful and visually stunning supercell. And if I look hard enough into my photos, I see the big tornado.
Now we’re about to head out to the Plains again, much later than usual given the quiet pattern in Tornado Alley. I’m not expecting much, but it will be great to be on the road again.
To get all the latest updates, follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. (Alethea’s here on YouTube as well.)
If you like our photos and video, won’t you consider throwing a few bucks into the storm chasing gas fund? Thank you!
Roll over any photo to see a caption, or click on an image to start a slide show.