Rumination of Thunder

Saturday, May 26, 2018

It's been slow

May 1st opened up with the latest tornado season in a long time. Late may is already threatening summer weather patterns. SO the last few weeks while closing down the classroom season, I've been chasing when I can. Sometimes it's just pretty clouds.

This next set was a small front driven squall line that was going back and forth on being severe. The tops of the storms were illuminated in moonlight:

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Storms 050118 May Day

This has been an interesting year. Although Spring supposedly started in March, think someone ignored the calendar. We have been in a long drought, broken up by an occasional cloud dropping less than a tenth of an inch of precipitation. We even had a brief snow as late as April 14th.

Our first hope came April 21st where we had a little over an inch of rain.

Rain would set out on the 7-10 day forecast at least 6 days out, then would disappear as it came closer. Then May 1st came into view. A slight risk slowly evolved. A tornado threat also appeared.

Before May 1st Kansas and Oklahoma had not had any tornadoes in 2018. The storm of May 1st stopped all that.

I watched the storms blow up the I70 highway.As they approached the I35 exchange I decided to run up north to see the storms.

I passed Kanopolis lake and started seeing the storms and the gray haze from the storms. I headed out through Brookville then turned out toward Glendale and Tescott. This is the area SSW of Salina.

This I believe is when the storm was hitting Tescott,

Then this may have been near Culver.

The storm took some time after the tornadoes to build.

As the sun set, I noticed some clouds out to the west. These appeared very low to the ground, but losing available light, I was done chasing.

I watched the ground scrubbers off in the distance in the failing light. They were down mudsoaked roads and out of touch. I started to head back to I35 but a wreck and several power poles diverted me to other wet dirt and clay roads for a fun run back to the highway and a long drive home. The storms provided quite the light show as I drove off with almost constant lightning. I wished I could have pulled over and watched for a while, but I had an early morning the next day and would get home late enough.

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Spring!

Happy Equinox! I am a huge fan of the GEOS-16 website, now waiting for the GOES-S to start sending images soon. The local NWS was able to spot wildfires three minutes before public started calling about it. Here is to a safe and exciting storm season.

Happy Spring #Equinox and happy #firstdayofspring! Today the length of night and day are nearly equal. The days will now become longer at the higher latitudes because it takes the sun longer to rise and set. More satellite imagery: https://t.co/mbgRYot60A pic.twitter.com/kGlGhM5V58
— NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) March 20, 2018

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Eclipse 2017

There really isn't much to say about the Great American Eclipse. I started the morning looking at weather reports and expected cloud cover and made the decision to head to central Nebraska.

Our original target of Atchinson ended up getting heavy rain, although they did spot totality. We ended up at Alexandria State Recreation Area which was a beautiful site, but the weather did not cooperate. We had some large thunderstorms build and brought in a lot of clouds.

For the first time in my chase career, we ran away from clouds. Luckily, the sun peaked out and I was able to capture quite a few shots before ending up in Bruning, Nebraska.

I'm still going through more pictures and will post more soon.