Archives

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.

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.

Once upon a time, I created book covers for my storm-chasing adventures, the Storm Seekers Series. I was striving to capture their cross-genre nature — they include adventure, romance, drama and humor — and I thought it might be cool to be a little different. I’ve learned a lot since then, and one thing that’s clear is that cross-genre covers are just confusing to readers. Another lesson is that “different” isn’t necessarily good. And the third, obvious lesson to anyone selling books these days is that books have to look great at thumbnail size, too, because the majority of sales of ebooks and print books happen online.

I’ve been designing covers for other authors and decided it was time to give some attention to my original trilogy. Using photos I took while chasing storms and a couple of smaller licensed elements, as well as the magic of Photoshop, I created illustrations for the covers that I hope will convey the excitement I still feel when I think about these stories.

I like romance in my adventures and interesting characters who grow (it takes Jack three books to complete the journey from cad to hero). I love action and, of course, the thrill of seeing a supercell come together and produce a tornado. Add elements of a science thriller and some kick-ass women as heroines, and you have the Storm Seekers Series. The first three books are also available in a virtual boxed set.  I say “the first three” because I am contemplating more. In the meantime, I’ve been writing romances under a pen name. More on those later.

The new covers are percolating through the online bookstores.

Want to chase some storms? Check out the books on Amazon or learn more and get links to other stores here.

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.

March 20 brought severe storms to Florida, so my friend Alethea Kontis and I headed out for a shakedown cruise of my new storm-chasing data setup. Unfortunately, we were chasing in the Orlando area, so we saw a lot more red lights, strip malls and trees than we did storms – but we did get a nice view of a tornado-warned cell on the west side of Orlando. See photos from the chase here.

In the meantime, I’ve added a chase report to the 2017 files here. On May 22 of last year, I chased in New Mexico. The day ended with a gorgeous storm that is much better to describe in photos, not words.

Not long until May – and another chase in Tornado Alley!  Stay tuned.

On this storm chase, Alethea Kontis and I headed west from Brevard County, targeting storms coming ashore on Florida’s west coast. I anticipated catching a cell west or just northwest of Orlando. City chasing is horrible, but we still managed to catch a tornado-warned storm, briefly.

Roll over the thumbnails to see the captions or click to see a larger image and start a slide show.