Successful couple weeks of severe weather shooting.

Nine days and three thousand miles later, I managed to capture some essential imagery for a severe weather project. Covering Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri, this is the largest project I've worked on yet. The photography covers a diverse set of atmospheric hazards, from tornadoes to flooding. I still need a couple more events in the Great Plains to complete the project. Hopefully, some July and August weather will yield something photogenic. In the meantime, I'm finishing up editing, gear maintenance, and a little writing as well. Additionally, I hope to have a couple new shots added to my portfolio in the next couple days.

An Unlikely Weapon, the story of Eddie Adams and his amazing photojournalism, opens this Thursday (July 2nd) at the Starz Film Center. I'll be attending at least one showing this week - hope to see some other Denver photojournalists there.

Another Colorado chase: several funnels, hail, and possibly one brief landspout tornado.

Once again, Weld County magic set up in my front yard and it was an easy catch with storms only moving at 10mph. Found some small hail, very heavy rain (which produced some flooding in Fort Collins), and several funnel clouds. This storm tried for hours to produce a tornado and I was right under it the entire time. A trained weather spotter called the National Weather Service to report a tornado, which there definitely was not at the time because I would have been in it! I would like to see our Spotter Network be more careful in what they call a tornado as this was definitely a false alarm. However, about 30 minutes later, I noticed some dust spinning up in a field just one mile from my location. Sure enough, a small landspout (non-supercell) tornado was trying to form. I noticed a small funnel at cloud base just above the spinning dust, and the dust had rotation and lifted rapidly. However, I never saw a fully condensed funnel so I'm hesitant to call it a tornado. In any case, it only lasted about 45 seconds and did no damage in this very rural area near Keensburg, Colorado. So, almost got my hat-trick, maybe I did, who knows. This photo is of two funnel clouds, which at first I thought were just "scud", but they both showed slight rotation and were firmly connected to the cloud base.

Street flooding, large hail, and another tornado makes for another $5.00 chase day in Colorado!

After getting drenched in torrential rain at my house in Boulder, I decided to head northeast to get in front of the developing late afternoon storms. Again, my primary goal was just to take all the gear through another test run but once again, Mother Nature produced quite a show. Southern Weld County was covered in hail, with many stones around one inch in diameter (one chaser reported hail up to two inches). Two cells merged into one large cell, a process which generated just enough shear to get things spinning (looking at the initial cloud structure and surface observations, shear seemed minimal today so I wasn't really planning a serious chase). Several funnels were reported, prompting tornado warnings. I stayed with the cell long enough to catch a view of one of the funnels. From my low contrast perspective, I could just barely see the funnel stretch and appear to make brief contact with the ground. This was later confirmed by one of the Denver Channel 7 storm chasers and thankfully, no damage or injuries were reported. No photos of the tornado this time because it was too small, poorly lit, and I was just a little too far away. I did get some nice shots of the updrafts thanks to a scoured atmosphere and a very defined rear storm line. Otherwise, I would call this a bust in the absence of good photos that I can use for any of my projects.

That being said, I only spent about $5.00 on this chase. Plus the water and soap to scrub the Weld County mud off the vehicle. So that's a total of $10 for two tornadoes this week. The cheap chasing is coming to an end however. Central Plains chasing begins soon and after these local chases, I think everything is ready. I'm now running signal enhanced mobile broadband in my chase vehicle, along with a couple portable surface weather instruments, GPS, and enough camera mounts to keep any photojournalist happy.

Chased a small tornado across the Denver area today.

Today was another day of vehicle and equipment testing, and I was going to chase just about any cloud as a dry run. Thankfully, plenty of mountain-induced shear kicked in and gave me a real tornadic storm to chase. The first tornado was born about 20 miles east of my house and I stayed with it for a few minutes, although I only ever saw the funnel without ground contact. Farther to the southeast, I caught up with an EF0 (maybe EF1) tornado that caused some light damage in Aurora. It was never very photogenic, mostly because of all the moisture, except when Brittany McKown nailed her photo that is currently posted on the Denver Channel 7 website - indeed, one of the best funnel cloud shots I have ever seen! I was able to catch a couple shots of a very thin tube / rope tornado. These are being reserved for other interested parties, so I am unable to post them at the moment. Media outlets are reporting a total of five tornadoes, and I suspect this number is very close to being correct, with one parent storm possibly responsible for all of them.

In all, a mostly successful chase with only my memory of the Denver road network and NOAA weather radio to guide me. Tonight, I finished installing GPS, retuned the com antennas, and serviced out the vehicle for field work later this week. Getting excited now!

Friday's chasing potential killed by high level moisture.

I woke up this morning to the disappointing sight of upper level moisture, which continued to build across northern Colorado for most of the day. This is a weather journalist's nightmare for two reasons: 1) it limits surface heating, which greatly reduces severe storm potential, and 2) it creates terrible lighting conditions so even if severe storms manage to develop, they are not photogenic. This is exactly what happened today. Just a few severe storms up in Wyoming. One produced a small tornado, but in poor lighting conditions. On the bright side, I saw this situation setting up early on and decided to stay home to work on equipment preparations for the beginning of my field season next week. I will be working on the third part of one of my bigger projects out in the central Great Plains for the remainder of the month. Any severe weather photos that aren't likely to be used in the project I'll post here, time permitting.

Almost forgot - we had a brief funnel cloud and two wall clouds over Boulder today, along with a beautiful rainbow as the storm passed to the northeast. Nothing was severe warned, but it was nice to see a little structure.

Worked out the forecasting mothballs today with a decent severe storm in Northern Colorado.

I had almost written off the severe storm potential today because I had to teach until late afternoon. My initial forecast was for severe thunderstorms north of the city of Limon because surface heating was ongoing in the morning, while the western urban corridor was locked under stratus. Indeed, the most severe storm of the day crept southeast across the Wyoming border toward Fort Morgan early this evening. Beautiful structure and golf ball sized hail kept it severe warned for at least half an hour. After watching the earlier storms to the south on the Palmer Divide fizzle, I stuck to my forecast and stayed north. Sometimes, the most basic meteorological (and climatological) parameters are the ones to pay attention to on chase day. Hopefully, I can pull another rabbit out of my hat as I head northeast into western Nebraska tomorrow, and probably again on Saturday.

EDIT: Michael Carlson actually got some great shots of the southern storms on the Palmer Divide - click on his name to the left to see them.

All new NaturalHazards.org is now online!

In 1998, I developed the first comprehensive website devoted to natural hazards. This site has been visited by over half of a million people from more than 75 countries, and is a primary reference for several major publications, such as Encyclopedia Britannica Online. That all sounds great, but the site was becoming quite dated and in desperate need of new content. I've spent the last couple weeks re-designing the site to make it more accessible and more visual. Although it still has some growing to do, the incorporation of high quality imagery and updated text content has given it at least a breath of life. Unfortunately, with my field season only one week away, most of my time will now be devoted to other projects. However, I am going to make a serious effort to constantly produce new content for the site as a byproduct of my work for these other projects. If you get a chance, take a look: http://naturalhazards.org. Of course, I welcome any and all feedback.