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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.

 

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.

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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.

 

It wasn’t much. But the scenery was beautiful, and the cows were amusing. And we’re hard-core, I guess!

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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.

 
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.

 
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.

 
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!

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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.

 
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!

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Sometimes small chances lead to big payoffs when storm chasing – like the gorgeous, lightning-filled spinning supercell Alethea Kontis and I caught in New Mexico on May 25, 2023.

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.

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.

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This is the third day out of four that I ended up storm chasing. Today’s chase was even more spontaneous than Thursday’s, as I’d been at an event for most of the afternoon and visibility was terrible today.

But then, in spite of the murk, I saw the cool structure on this severe storm and couldn’t resist. Besides, the hail core looked decent, especially for Florida’s Space Coast, so I headed north from Rockledge to see if I could intercept it. Or, more accurately, to let it chase me. It followed me as I headed north.

I was behind the eight ball from the start of this very short chase, mostly thanks to the prodigious traffic lights of Cocoa. That said, when I saw a perfect hail shelter – a carport at a closed business – I couldn’t resist parking in this strategic spot and waiting to be cored. That’s what chasers call letting yourself be run over by a storm’s hail core.

The experience of being under a metal carport in a hailstorm is satisfyingly loud. These weren’t giant stones, but for Florida? They were pretty good. I measured multiple 1.5-inch stones. They melted quickly. And they shredded leaves on the trees.

I didn’t get a chance to get a radar snapshot in the middle of the barrage, but an even bigger core passed to my southeast. I’m wondering how big those hailstones were.

You can check out my chase on the video, and here are a few photos. Roll over any one to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show.

 
Severe storms two days in a row. With hail. And tornado warnings. In Florida? And I got to chase them both.

It’s been a weird week for us here in east-central Florida and the Space Coast, but the weather reflects the overall weather pattern, with the southern branch of the jet stream enhancing our chances of severe storms.

On Wednesday, April 26, Alethea Kontis and I headed out west of Titusville to see the brewing storms. There was a decent chance of big hail with unusually cold temperatures aloft. We had a great view of the sky from a point on State Road 50, and as you can see in the video, there’s disturbing news about Cow, our wind-up companion.

We left our viewing spot after reviewing the radar and got on a good-looking storm a bit farther south, following it all the way to Vero Beach through horrible traffic and a lot of rain. Once we got south of it, we were able to get a couple of shots of the pretty structure from a bridge over Turkey Creek in the Palm Bay area. At this time, it was dumping drifts of small hail on parts of Melbourne, but we wanted to stay out of the core in hopes of getting photos.

There weren’t many more opportunities for that, given the territory, but we parked under an overhang in Indian Harbor Shores and waited for the hail to come to us. There was lots of it – but it was all small. Still, it felt like being in a hurricane for a few minutes, and there was lots of minor tree debris and flooding on the road afterward.

 

Tornado-warned storms on Day Two

The next day, April 27, I worked all day, then saw storms headed our way. They seemed promising, so I headed out to the west side of Cocoa near I-95 to take a look. I got into some small hail, then tried to get into position on a tornado-warned storm coming at me without actually getting creamed by said tornado. It was radar-indicated, and while the video shows curvature to the storm amid the deluge, I didn’t see anything tornadic.

But I dropped slightly south to Rockledge to intercept another storm, and it did a dramatic dance for me before moving east with a tornado warning on it. I hastened to the edge of the Indian River Lagoon and saw what was probably the wildest storm I’ve ever seen in Florida. The structure was fluffy and mushy and tinged with green, presumably from the hail, but a real live rotating wall cloud formed under it. It wasn’t rotating quickly, but it was stunning. Was anything happening in the murk? I wasn’t fully prepared for my “gentleman’s chase” and couldn’t really zoom in well with the lenses I had, but my imagination was working overtime seeing funnels in the gunk.

Check out the video and see what you think.

 

I’m starting to feel warmed up for Tornado Alley. If you want to keep up with our chases this season, please 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!

Here are photos from both days of chasing. Roll over an image to see the caption, or click on any one to start a slide show.

Being a morning person is a good quality for a photographer who strives to capture the best light of the day. I’m not a morning person. However, I will drag myself out of bed for a predawn SpaceX launch in hopes of getting cool light effects.

Only this morning I woke up extra early, took the dogs out and found the launch had been pushed until shortly after sunrise. Oh, well! I was up already. So I headed to Cocoa Village’s Riverfront Park and took a few photos.

 
With the rocket heading away toward the northeast with its GPS cargo, the launch photos were ho-hum. (No doubt someone north of the launch site got a great pic with the rising sun.) But the sunrise photos were very nice indeed. And the video is relaxing – part sunrise timelapse, part launch.

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Another day, another rocket launch from the Space Coast – only it’s never routine. Especially when you have a SpaceX Heavy launch, a beautiful twilight and the return of two boosters to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Of course, someday I’d like to be super close to the booster return. I’ve seen a booster return from the Cape (and other places), but always with an obstructed view. That said, it’s pretty magical to see the separation from a little distance and witness all the mechanics of the return overhead and the boosters plummeting back to Earth. These moments really feel like science fiction.

 
So with all the wonder of this launch, with a Space Force payload, I’d say my photos are not technically great, but they’re interesting. The wide-angle shots are fine and caught the pretty light and arc of the contrail and “jellyfish.”

For the zoomed shots, I have a Nikon 200-500mm lens. I love it, for the most part, but it’s a challenge to focus on the fly because there isn’t just one infinity. (As my husband jokes, it’s to infinity and beyond.) So the trees far across the lagoon might be in focus, but the rocket as it lifts into the sky might be just a little “more” infinity. The lens is heavy, and while I sometimes use a tripod, handheld works better when you’re pointing up. Thus adjusting the focus to catch a zooming rocket poses an additional challenge. There’s also a haze factor at times, not to mention insane distances, but I think today my focus just wasn’t perfect.

Still, you can see the boosters separate and make their return burns in the photos, and yes, it’s still like science fiction. One of the coolest shots is a booster silhouetted, seemingly tiny, against the fiery orange of the contrail as the hardware hurtles back to Earth.

I ran two GoPros from my viewing spot in Cocoa Village, one in “Nightlapse” mode and the other in regular timelapse mode, trying to cover my bases as the light changed just after sunset. The videos were quite similar, only one was wider than the other. You can see both in the video.

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The show is almost over. The last few night-blooming cereus blossoms are maturing on our cactus vines, which climb a palm tree and our front porch. I’m also trying to start one in our live oak after seeing photos of a dazzling display in Orlando.

What am I talking about? The dinner-plate-size flowers that each bloom for just one night. Here in central Florida, they start blooming in May.

This year, as I do every year, I shot timelapse video of the flowers opening. Only this time, I included it in a three-minute documentary about the blooms. It pretty much says it all. These delicate dancers of the night live their best life when most creatures are asleep.

See the video above, or click on any of these images to start a slide show.