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Sometimes, as a storm chaser, I take a chance on a marginal forecast rather than chase a higher likelihood of severe storms in a place I don’t want to chase.

On May 11, I targeted an area with decent upper-level winds and dewpoints – where Colorado meets the Oklahoma Panhandle and the northern Texas Panhandle. I refined the target to a storm coming out of New Mexico, and after driving in a rather frustrating loop (road network issues), I ended up in front of a storm coming out of Clayton, New Mexico, that just got prettier and stronger until it ended up being warned as severe.

This storm and its sister storm had incredible lightning that I chased all the way back to Amarillo.

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

Our version of big waves probably wouldn’t lure Laird Hamilton, but for Florida, today’s waves were pretty impressive. Offshore Hurricane Joaquin was pumping them up, and the surfers came out in droves to Cocoa Beach and “Second Light,” at Patrick Air Force Base. See my photos from today here.

Meanwhile, summer is over, with few nighttime lightning storms for me to shoot here on the east coast. Nonetheless, I’ve pulled together the sparkling scraps from the summer, and you can find them here. The quest continues to get the perfect lightning shot at Port Canaveral’s Exploration Tower, but I got a couple that were pretty.

And now, the 90-degree days of autumn continue! Enjoy!

For more storm photos and videos from this year, including twisters from Tornado Alley, see the 2015 storm galleries.

 

Lightning was sparse over the summer of 2015 – or should I say photographable lightning at night in east-central Florida was sparse. Other areas seemed to light up nightly.

In this post are gathered stormy scraps from this summer, including a few lightning shots that helped make the season palatable.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.

It was a beautiful evening, with the full moon rising over the ocean and storms heading out to sea.  I set up the camera to shoot automatically while chatting with friends at one of their oceanfront condos (man, I’d love to have that perch for photography all the time!).  The bad thing about that is, when the rain started spitting again, I wasn’t there to wipe off the lens. So while I got a handful of cool shots with lightning, the ones with raindrops were pretty much unlovable. I did my best to repair them, but after a while, they start to look like Impressionist paintings. (Maybe that’s not all bad.)

All that said, the photo above was taken after I’d wiped off the lens. The contrast wasn’t high, as the bolt lit up the cloud/precipitation in the air, and the ocean was pretty dark, but I like the subtlety. Also, I wanted to post it here because the social media outlets, like Facebook and Twitter, always make photos with this kind of subtle light look like crap. I realize the services are compressing them, but it still makes me a bit frustrated.

Want to see more storm photos from this year, including tornadoes? Check out the storm reports – as always, a work in progress.

 
On May 15, I chased with Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal, Michel Millaire, Matt Grinter, Brad and Dayna Rousseau, Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland and Stephen Barabas. We began the chase on storms in southwest Nebraska, just north of the Colorado line.

While I got some beautiful lightning and enjoyed the chase, the trip “home” to the hotel ended in disaster when I hit a deer in the Middle of Nowhere, Nebraska. It’s a long story, but after the nightmare of dealing with AAA (who eventually lost my car – yeah, I found it again), the police and the crazy scene, I got to a hotel in the wee hours with the help of friends (special thanks to Dan Shaw and Greg Ansel), and my car went into a shop the next day in North Platte. After we found it. Seriously, it’s a long story.

To top things off, I had a horrible cold and spent the weekend worried my car would be totaled. It wasn’t, but it had to be held hostage for repairs. A rental car got me back on the road.

That said, the pictures are nice. Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

 
On May 9, I chased storms on and off with Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal, Michel Millaire, Matt Grinter and Brad and Dayna Rousseau. We targeted southwest Kansas and ended up in the Oklahoma Panhandle, witnessing beautiful storms along the way.

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

 

I’m busy trying to meet several work deadlines before heading out west to Tornado Alley, but the east coast of Florida has provided some welcome distractions for a storm chaser this month. We’ve had shelf clouds and lightning, though the lightning was a bit sparse. Let’s just say I spent several hours clicking the shutter for the little bit I got.

Still, there’s nothing more therapeutic than standing by the ocean, listening to the waves and thunder, while trying to capture a lightning bolt with my camera. Check out all the April storm photos below.

Stay tuned – the Tornado Alley chase is coming soon!

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

Zap Bang, the third novel in the Storm Seekers trilogy of storm-chasing adventures by Chris Kridler, will be published Sept. 16, and to celebrate, Sky Diary Productions is offering a giveaway! The goodies include:

• Signed copies of the paperbacks of FUNNEL VISION, TORNADO PINBALL and ZAP BANG
• Matching bookmarks
• Captured lightning disc – a 2″ Lichtenberg figure created inside a piece of clear acrylic by a 5-million-volt particle accelerator! (with velvet bag)
• Three 1″ Storm chaser/Funnel Vision pins
• Flashing/thundering lightning bolt keychain
• Storm chaser T-shirt from the Sky Diary Storm Stuff Store (choice of colors)
• Storm chaser decal

The captured lightning is completely cool, and you’ll read about it in Zap Bang. The giveaway ends on Sept. 22, so get in your entries now!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

On June 5, 2014, I started my day in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and decided to target southeast Colorado. This would be my last day of chasing in Tornado Alley for this season.

I made a stop in Limon, running into Charles Edwards of Cloud 9 Tours, and evaluated data before committing to the target. The first storm I chased was near the southernmost town in Colorado, Branson.

The severe storms led me into the dramatic topography of northeastern New Mexico and then the Texas Panhandle, when lightning lured me to pause during my all-night drive, as I was starting my trip home to the east coast.

I was especially delighted to get shots of a storm looming over the Route 66 landmark U Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas. The beautiful wee-hours storms were a satisfying way to end a trip of meager setups and an insane amount of driving.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.

 
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.

 

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.