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I’ve seen an occasional sun halo here in east-central Florida, and I’ve also seen sun dogs. But I’ve never seen a halo of the complexity I witnessed the afternoon of February 10 in Rockledge. My best shot of the phenomenon was my first, with my phone. I got my “real” camera a little late to capture it when it was at its best. But it was still pretty amazing and lingered for a while.

There are names for all of the arcs you see in the images. The light effects are created when sunlight interacts with ice crystals in the atmosphere. And some of the best ones you’ll see are in cold environments where “diamond dust” ice particles hover lower in the air as well. That’s why I was so surprised to see these pretty decent effects in Florida on a warm day.

The round circle is a 22-degree halo. The bright lights in the ring on either side are sun dogs, or parhelia. Wikipedia helped me identify the other arcs. The upside-down “rainbow” at the top is a circumzenithal arc, seen resting atop a supralateral arc (this is visible as a faint rainbow-type arc in the wider shots). There also seems to be an upper tangent arc kissing the top of the 22-degree halo.

Now I’ll be anxious to see if I can catch this phenomenon again … before I can travel to a colder clime to get a really elaborate demonstration.

I chased lightning storms tonight as they made their way into Brevard County, Florida. Farther west, the storms had earned severe warnings and even a tornado warning.

I headed to the St. Johns River first, seeing a beautiful lightning-illuminated shelf cloud on the way. The shelf had eased over my position by the time I stopped and got a few photos of the lightning as the wind rushed through the tall grasses and palms. It started to rain before better photo opportunities presented themselves, so I headed east and parked in a few locations in Viera to snap the rest of the photos here.

The culmination of the evening was a gorgeous lightning crawler that filled the sky. And let’s not even talk about the bolts I missed!  (There are always bolts I miss.) All in all, it was fun to nab some good lightning. It’s been way too long.

Click on the thumbnails to see a slide show of the larger versions.

As I’m not chasing in the Plains this year because of the COVID-19 plague, I’m trying to grab a chase here and there near my home in eastern Florida. This wasn’t a great night for lightning, but I caught a couple of bolts on May 26, 2020, in Viera, Florida. I’ll take what I can get in this very difficult year.

N.B.: Backdated so it makes sense in the chase report. 

I’m back-dating this post, as I didn’t have a chance to post the photos before now. And also, somehow, I hoped maybe I’d get to chase in Tornado Alley this season. Given the ongoing pandemic and the possibility of either getting and spreading COVID-19 or increasing the burden on some small town’s health system if I did get it when I was on the road, it seemed like the responsible thing to do to not head to the Plains. Turns out, except for a couple of pretty photo opportunities, I don’t feel like I’ve missed all that much, storm-wise. What I have missed is that sense of freedom while following the weather around a gorgeous landscape, late-night diner meals, and seeing my friends who share the same passion for weather as I do.  I really hope the world is looking better in 2021.

All that said, on April 20, there were tornadoes in Central Florida. I did a local chase, heading to Mims, and caught a rotating storm with a decent wall cloud as it crossed U.S. 1.  No tornado, but it was pretty nice.

Back in 2001, when I’d been chasing storms for just a few years, Dave Lewison and I met up with Scott Blair and Jason Politte on May 30 and headed into northeast New Mexico in pursuit of supercells. We found one that formed on the high plains. There were cold temperatures aloft and the perfect ingredients for rock-hard hail. We knew the storm was producing this hail – we could see it, falling from the cloud like a white waterfall – and we were determined to get ahead of it.

Even now, chasers get caught by hail. Hell, some chasers rush into it. But back in the days of no in-car radar data, when we’d “go visual” to figure out where to be in relation to the storm, it was even easier to screw up. And boy, did we screw up. We got on I-40 and were caught by the storm just inside the Texas Panhandle, with no exits or shelter in sight. Our cars were bombed by sideways-blowing hail for about ten minutes, including stones up to baseball size. To this day, I avoid chasing storms on Interstates because of this experience. See more pictures and a thorough account of this chase in the 2001 storm chasing report.

I’ve posted a new edit of the video from this day. Be warned: THERE IS CURSING. This was also way before everyone was shooting in high-def. And listening to my angst makes me cringe a bit. But because of this experience, I kept my cool when I got into an even worse hailstorm on May 12, 2005. You might say I’ve become a bit hail-avoidant since then.

A severe storm blew through Florida’s Space Coast on June 19, 2019. I awaited it at Port Canaveral and shot it coming in over Exploration Tower. Then I watched it make conditions gnarly for boats in the port. It wasn’t a great day for boating, to say the least. I’ve never seen waves like that on the water there.

May 18 was one of those chase days that was pleasantly low-pressure. Alethea Kontis and I chased with old friends, and we didn’t find any tornadoes, just beautiful storms from Alva to Enid, Oklahoma, culminating in amazing sunset colors in the turbulent clouds.

The time-lapse video is hypnotic, and I was delighted with the photo opportunities on the beautiful farm road where we wrapped up the chase as golds, oranges and blues roiled through the clouds.

Today was the first real chase day for Alethea Kontis and me in 2019. We’d driven out from Florida a couple of days before. It was Alethea’s second year of storm chasing, and she hadn’t seen a tornado yet. This day would deliver a beautiful one near McCook, Nebraska, that we saw from just south of Culbertson. At times it had a “Wizard of Oz” appearance. We met up with more chaser friends, and later that night, we saw a gorgeous lightning show from Lexington, Nebraska.

We drove about 450 miles this day – some of which was a large and frustrating circle. Pretty much par for the course on a storm chase.

Roll over the gallery images for more information about each photo, and click on a photo to see larger images.

A morning hailstorm on March 27, 2019, took Florida’s Space Coast by surprise. I saw it coming and got a few shots from U.S. 1 in Rockledge before it clobbered our neighborhood and went on to do even more damage on the beaches.

Two-inch hailstones fell in Indialantic, taking out car and house windows and damaging roofs and stucco. The biggest stones I saw at our house in Rockledge were one-inch-plus, right as the onslaught began. Unfortunately, we also had so much rain – especially since another hailstorm followed the first one – that a little water got into the house.

Alethea Kontis and I targeted southwest Kansas near the Colorado border for our first Tornado Alley chase of the 2018 season. Despite a brief foray into Colorado, we ended up chasing pretty cells from Kansas into the Oklahoma panhandle. We saw multiple funnels but nothing close to a tornado. It was mostly a rainbow chase, but a pretty one. And we got to see Dorothy’s House, straight from Oz.

Roll over the thumbnails to see the captions, or click on an image to start a slide show of larger photos.