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On May 20, 2014, Peggy Willenberg and I shot south from the Nebraska panhandle into central Colorado, driving hard to get into position in front of a cell coming out of the Denver area.

We got in front of the storm around Last Chance and were rewarded with a spinning storm that made frequent wall clouds but could never quite produce a tornado, though it was tornado-warned as it passed over Burlington. Instead, we saw some hot lightning from the town.

 

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The blue moon – the full moon on August 20 – was a magical photographic opportunity for me. I was able to shoot a lightning storm with the full moon overhead, from the beautiful vantage point of Cocoa, Florida, looking east over the Indian River Lagoon.

I’ve photographed not-so-great shots of the moon with a thunderstorm before, but nothing like this. Better yet, there were multiple shots, though the lead one shown here is definitely my favorite.

Meanwhile, prints of this photo (and other lightning images) can be ordered here.

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June 18 offered a spontaneous, get-off-the-couch chase starting about 9:30 p.m. I saw flashes of lightning, checked the radar and decided to head to Port Canaveral, not far from my home in Brevard County, Florida.

While the lightning wasn’t so close that it sizzled, I did catch a few bolts in an atmospheric setting.

 

One of the most impressive storms of my 2013 Tornado Alley chase didn’t produce a tornado, though it was tornado-warned. That’s because it was spinning like a top. The May 26, 2013, supercell near Arcadia, Nebraska, was LP, or low-precipitation – not much rain, but amazing structure. It also had one of the best lightning shows I’ve ever seen.

I chased this day with Greg Stephens, Dayna Vettese and Brad Rousseau, Bill Hark, and Robert Balogh. We started the day in North Platte, Nebraska, dropped south to McCook and then headed back up to North Platte, hoping storms would fire along the dryline push. There was a high risk of a blue-sky bust, but just when we were about to give up, a couple of storms exploded.

The storm I chose became an incredibly beautiful low-precipitation, sculpted supercell, with a fantastic lightning show after dark. I got more lightning shots from this one storm than I have taken in entire years.

Note: Post updated with images and details transferred from my old Sky Diary site.

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I chased storms on May 20 with Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland, Dayna Vettese and Brad Rousseau, Greg Stephens, and Mark Robinson and his Weather Network crewmate Jaclyn Whittal. We started the day in Norman, Oklahoma, and chose southern Oklahoma as our target, not realizing that a devastating tornado would strike so near to our starting point later in the day.

We saw a tornado, too, but there was no joy in storm chasing this day when we heard the news about Moore being struck.

The May 20 Duncan, Oklahoma, tornado was small, and the condensation funnel didn’t extend all the way to the ground, but we had confirmation that the circulation did indeed contact the ground. After we saw it, we saw the radar from the Moore, Oklahoma, tornado and knew we had missed a large and devastating tornado. A lot of the storm chasers (and there are so many these days) were in our target area and missed it, too.

Note: Post updated with images transferred from the old Sky Diary site.

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On the second day of my Tornado Alley sojourn, meant to get me in position for subsequent chases, I managed to catch up with a cluster of pretty storms in northwest Kansas.

The storms were, at one time, severe, but when I photographed them in a gorgeous twilight, they were simply prolific lightning producers.

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Sometimes social obligations make it hard to chase storms, but a nasty severe storm came to me on Sunday, May 11, 2013, in Rockledge, Florida. This was a wicked line that approached Brevard County, on Florida’s east coast, from the west.

I was at a party and went outside to shoot photos of the approaching storm. The lightning became very intense as it neared, so I retreated from the home’s driveway to the alcove at the front door. Note: This is not a safe shelter from lightning, but I felt less exposed there.

I shot a little video, then switched to stills, just before a lightning bolt hit a tree just on the other side of the home’s garage. The flash and bang were instantaneous – what storm chasers call a “flang” – and it scared me thoroughly. I was lucky it didn’t hit any closer.

Afterward, I got photos of the palm tree that was damaged. There was a hole blasted in its trunk.

The storm became severe-warned and caused a lot of minor wind damage.

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I chased a severe storm the evening of April 29 in hopes of catching a little lightning. I got lucky with this shot over Port Canaveral, Florida, with a cruise ship in the foreground. 

My Tornado Alley chase is on hold (shades of 2012) while the pattern continues to be un-May-like in the Plains. So any storms I get to see in Florida are a bonus.

Meanwhile, please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel. I’ve adopted the new layout, which better organizes my videos, and you’ll be able to keep track of my storm chases when I post new ones as I travel.

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You’d think, as a freelancer, I’d always have some time to be in the right place during a storm. No – I’m a working stiff, too, and so I was shooting restaurant photos when the funnel clouds/waterspout were reported Friday in Brevard County, Florida. A friend called me to tell me she’d filmed a funnel in the Suntree area, and it was a beauty.  Leave it to the storm chaser to miss it …

So after my last assignment, I rushed north to Melbourne to catch the tail end of the storms as they went out to sea. The motion and structure were pretty, but I didn’t see any funnels – just a deceptive feature that was sort of the right shape, but not, as far as I could tell, the real thing. The feature, which appears to consist of condensing scud clouds, is pictured below (at right in photo). At least I got a lucky daytime lightning bolt. I definitely didn’t have “Funnel Vision” on Friday!

The Aug. 15 lightning show in Brevard County, Florida, wasn’t (for me) easy to catch, but I got a few photos that may be of academic interest, if not as artistic as I’d like. There were technical challenges, one being that most of the bolts were embedded in rain. Another was that during the ten minutes they were really good, I was driving and stuck at Cocoa’s many stubborn traffic lights. Nonetheless, you can find the photos here. Above is one of the better ones.