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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!

 
It wasn’t easy to catch the August 15 lightning in east-central Florida, as much of it was embedded in rain – or I was getting rained on, meaning it was almost impossible to get a shot without a drop on the lens. 

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.

I headed to Port St. John, then meandered west to near the Lone Cabbage Fish Camp in west Cocoa. I got a few OK shots there, but when I was headed back east, the blob of precipitation that was heading offshore exploded with cloud-to-ground strikes when I was in no position to shoot them. Figures. I finished with a few shots in Cocoa and then along the Indian River Lagoon.

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I have a “Highway to Hail” sticker on my car. It’s one of those storm chaser puns, with nothing to do with the AC/DC album but everything to do with those icy, rock-hard missiles from the sky that are always a hazard when chasing tornadoes. I’ve had two car-remodeling encounters with hail. One was May 30, 2001, in the Texas Panhandle, the event known among my friends as “Mile Marker 6.” That’s the sign on I-40 that featured prominently in the video I shot that day.

Even worse was May 12, 2005, near South Plains, Texas, a day that was at least partially redeemed by the really nice tornado that preceded the assault. I’ve remastered my video and produced a new edit that I’ve uploaded to YouTube (below).

All of my hail encounters helped inform the hail barrage that happens during one of the action sequences in my novel Funnel Vision. I once took shelter in a country airport, for instance, though it was in Colorado, not Kansas. And if you turn up the sound in this video, you’ll understand that visceral, chilling feeling of having your car destroyed while you’re still inside it. Enjoy.

Note: For best quality, roll your cursor over the lower right of the video window, click on the gear symbol, and choose 720p HD.

I’ve been longing for nighttime lightning, as I always do during Florida’s summers. I want to photograph it, of course, but there’s just not as much of it as you might think. Often, storms fire early and shoot off outflow boundaries, sometimes in the form of sweeping shelf clouds like this one in Rockledge on Wednesday. I’m still hoping for more!

Meanwhile, the tropics are active. While hurricanes are fascinating, mostly, I think they’re more pain than pleasure. They present fewer photographic opportunities, unless you’re on the International Space Station, and they cause a lot of misery. However, if you’re into the violence of nature, as many storm chasers are, it’s hard to resist them. I’d rather chase tornadoes any day.

Just a quick note: I’ll be speaking at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Parkway NW in Palm Coast, at 1:30 p.m. Saturday. I’ll show “Chasing Reality” and some cool storm slides, and I’ll talk about the realities of storm chasing – and what it took to make it realistic but fun in my fictional take on chasing, the novel “Funnel Vision.” I’ll also sell and sign books. Breeze on by!

On Friday, make sure you check out my friend Kam Miller’s blog, Glass Half-Full in Hollywood. Kam is an experienced TV and film writer and offers fabulous advice straight from Hollywood’s movers and shakers. And speaking of shakers, she also features Friday cocktails on the blog. I’m guest-blogging there Friday about Tales of the Cocktail, the convention in New Orleans from which I just returned (and from which I’m still recovering). While I was there, I helped The Times-Picayune cover the event with blogs, photos and videos.

I’ve been busy lately. Lots of photo shoots. Not nearly enough storms. And then there were the four lost days in which I disappeared into stomach-bug purgatory. But I’m hopping again and looking forward to speaking on Saturday afternoon at the Orlando Science Center about storm chasing. You can find me at 2 and 3 p.m., chatting in easily digestible 20-minute segments, about how storm chasers find tornadoes. [UPDATE: I’ll introduce the “Tornado Alley” movie at 2, then talk at 2:15 and 3:15.] I’ll also share fun facts about the extremes of Florida weather. Look for me on the fourth floor, in the Science on a Sphere area. While you’re there, you can pretend to give a weather forecast on TV. The image here shows my attempt to do this. All I can say is, green screens are tricky.

At OSC, you can also catch Sean Casey’s “Tornado Alley” IMAX movie, which has some beautiful storm footage and a neat little story about the frustrations and triumphs of the Vortex 2 tornado research team. Of course, the film also features Casey’s home-brewed tank, the Tornado Intercept Vehicle. He visited OSC recently. I won’t be bringing a tank, but I will bring a piece of a car that was trashed by hail!

Thanks to the Orlando Sentinel’s Theme Park Rangers for noting my appearance Saturday. Also, OSC interviewed me by phone and shaped my answers into wee nuggets for its blog. I have more events coming up, which you can find in my new calendar: storm-chasing talks, book signings, and another talk about storm photography in Vero Beach.

Florida has afforded a fair number of photo opportunities since I’ve been back from what I consider my real storm-chasing trip, the one to Tornado Alley.

I shouldn’t be a storm snob, but the Plains storms have such power and magnificence, it’s hard for Florida’s summer thunderstorms to compete. Still, Florida is king of the shelf clouds, and it’s tops nationally in lightning (though not always at night, when I prefer to shoot it).

 

Wednesday, June 13, I caught a very pretty shelf cloud in Brevard County, Florida, as it came over the Indian River Lagoon. One result was the panorama above; the other is the video, which includes time-lapsed footage.

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It’s always difficult adjusting to the routine of regular life when I get off the road. Storm chasing embodies freedom for me – the ability to go wherever I wish, according to nature’s whims, to follow the weather. I am totally immersed in my passion.

I love being at home, too, but my attentions are fragmented. I have to work to earn a living, acknowledge bills and deal with the drudgery that comes from basic life maintenance. (Though laundry follows me even on the road.) At least Florida offers storms in the summer, although the photo opportunities are more scant than you might think, especially for lightning.

The night of June 10, I headed out about 9 p.m. EDT in hopes of catching some lightning in a severe storm that was approaching the east-central Florida coast. Most of the bolts seemed buried in rain, and I was preparing myself for disappointment.

I decided to give it a few more minutes in case it went into anvil-crawler mode, and I was pleasantly surprised by a handful of spectacular crawlers, shot from Rockledge, Florida.

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As I update and migrate posts from the old Sky Diary site, I’m leaving out a few lackluster storm days. But I wanted to include this one because I visited one of my favorite places at sunset.

Some of my chaser friends started the drive home on June 3, 2012, while others considered their options.

I decided to target northwest Oklahoma, from Woodward to Alva. The storms that formed barely moved, but I was delighted to end the day – and my 2012 Tornado Alley chase – in the Shattuck windmill park that inspired the fictional one in my novel Funnel Vision.

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May 29 of this year was an example of a great storm chase that didn’t include catching a tornado. There was a brief tornado with this storm, but from my position, I didn’t see it. Nonetheless, at one point I was incredibly close to a rotating wall cloud – do I get points for proximity? No, I guess not.

 
But the real crown jewel of this chase was a few minutes of incredible structure on this supercell, which I followed with friends, then on my own, from Canton, Oklahoma, toward the Oklahoma City metro.

The night’s finale was lightning around the National Weather Service in Norman.

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