Manhattan Kansas Tornado...Beginning? New Photos

I was editing video awhile back and always check each lightning flash (since I have more time in the "offseason"), where I noticed what I thought was a truncated cone/elephant trunk-looking funnel. Below are two photos, the first as-is, and the second with added contrast.











This was shot on the southwest side of Junction city looking north near the town of Ogden. I'm unsure of the actual time, but minutes later spotters would report a tornado on the ground near Ogden. Here is a google map I created showing our location. The "Chapman" tornado (which destroyed much of the town like Greensburg, but was rated an EF-3) had dissipated to the west and the supercell was now cycling, luckily, for Junction City...and a new one would form, like I stated above, near Ogden.

We could never see this in "real" time as lightning was mostly in the core or out ahead of the storm near the RFD gust front...nothing near the updraft of the storm. This was not a chaser-friendly storm, as it was 1. Night time 2. Very HP (high-precipitation) and 3. moving E/NE at 50 mph...before slowing down to about 35 mph near Manhattan. The only problem I see with this, is that the funnel is so high-based and seems out of place...but looks rather convincing (to me) regardless...because of the laminar shape it has.

Below are some new photos, some from today, the sunset is from about a week and a half ago...this fire resembled a supercell (or did to me :) ). It was a controlled burn near Desoto/Clearview City, Kansas...where the old Army ammunition plant was. So it was nearly impossible to get very close to it, without trespassing.









Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

New Boring Pictures, New Blog

Andy Fischer now has a new forecasting blog, which you can view here. He wrote a paper, entitled, "Significant Nighttime Tornadoes in 2008 Associated with Relatively Stable Low-level Conditions" that was co-authored with Jon Davies, is available here and is a very good read!!

Below are some recent, boring pictures...I really, really need some spaceweather action or some atmospheric optics. Darin told me there was a HUGE moon halo last night, and I wish I had been up for it. I'm falling behind on the DVD production, thanks to numerous school-related projects and won't be releasing it for another month...

HP Supercell Stormchase in November

The only cool part of the day (after leaving this storm temporarily) was punching back through the core....where we met the rotation and strong inflow, and a sudden wind-shift from the north after...forcing me to slam on our brakes after a small spinup no more than 10 yards wide spun up just 20 yards in front of us. It scared the crap out of me/us. Darin then told me to floor it after the wind-shifted back to the east as the rain bands slowly rotating around us (I watch the road not sky and focus on driving in tense situations such as this). That was about as cool as it got.

We had problems streaming on TornadoVideos.Net yesterday...not for actually streaming, but my computer locking up after about 3-5 minutes of doing so. We currently use AdobeFlash Encoder 2.5 and I think we might have figured the problem out afterwards...definitely need to tune things up better before 2009.

Here are some pictures shortly after that:









See ya 2008!

Halloween Harvest

Thanks to Mike Hollingshead for the great ideas. I was heading to Devin's last night and stopped for about 15 minutes to shoot some photos of a farmer cuttin' beans on Halloween at dusk. My tripod is a POS and I'm taking it back because it broke...I should just get a good one