Email me at midwesternmeso (AT) hotmail [DOT] com

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Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Photos Continued, Darin and Lanny Reporting Live for KAKE May 4, 2007

Video Is Here

Above is a video of Darin (those who do not know, Darin is my best friend and chase partner of whom I was with that night) and Lanny (Lanny and I have been good friends since that life-changing night) reporting live for KAKE television in Wichita, Kansas the night of the Greensburg tornado. Jay Prater is the on-air meteorologist and did a wonderful job covering things as they unfolded on May 4th, 2007. Jay disabled embedding, so you'll have to click the link above.

This poor monarch (below) had one of its wings clipped and couldn't fly...after taking him inside and googling solutions, most talked about just hoping they would be okay after eating and nursing their wound for awhile.....

Broken Wing

Cadillac Ranch

Foggy Sunrise Part II

I've been super busy this past weekend and have hardly had time to catch up on emails, photos, etc...hopefully I will tonight. I still have quite a few to process and will post those soon as well. Here are some recent photos for now.









In Flight

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Another Foggy Morning, Great Egrets

Another foggy morning with fogbows and a beautiful sunrise...along with some "Great Egrets" More soon.....

Pillar Fog

Foggy Sunrise

Glacial Sunrise II

Glacial Sunrise

Foggy Sunrise II

Great Egrets

Great Egret

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Some New Pictures, "Tornadoes Rampage"

Edit: If you are looking for pictures of tornadoes, my storm photo collection is here.

Last week, I went back to Weston, Missouri and into the state park there I found a beautiful overlook. This place would be perfect, almost, to view early morning fog but unfortunately closes at sundown and doesn't open back up until sunrise.

Repression 20

Missouri's state parks definitely are a step up or two from Kansas' parks.

I took this Friday night after a beautiful sunset:

Cadillac Ranch

Last Thursday, when heading to Devin's for dinner, I saw a faint sundog and of course it was the one time I didn't have my camera, but I let a Flickr friend, Nicole, and she snapped a picture of it.

I snapped this (below) yesterday afternoon, just trailing the elevated convection, enjoying rain-free bases just a few miles from my house.



And after telling her I was going to head out last night to do some long exposures of something...she wanted to tag along, so I met up with her and we shot various long exposures near Gardner, Kansas and I tried to help her out with questions about photography. She definitely has the eye, but not totally familiar with all of the "mechanics" of her camera, similar to myself, so helping someone out that is eager to learn is something I'll never turn down, since the same help was given to me, I'm just paying it forward. (if I have time of course!).

Here's a photo I shot of Nicole last night, "painting" her with the flashlight and making it look as if there were 3 of her.

Triple Nicks

Just doing this last night sparked some more creative ideas I hope to try out tonight or very soon, before I forget them.

In other news, "Tornadoes Rampage" is airing now on The Discovery Channel, and after turning them down several times, offered us the price we were looking for, for stock footage. The 6 other requests I've had just this year for stock footage, have yet to air or I've either turned them down as well. It's insane to get this many requests in one year, for shows over tornadoes...the public interest is obviously spiking once again. Off to do more homework...

Sunday, September 14, 2008

9/12/08 Storm Chase

Edited: 9/16/06

Derek Shaffer and I targeted Iola, Kansas prior to leaving KC, and didn't make it that far south when a storm fired SW of Garnett (below)

Greeley Beginning

It was fairly high based at first, but quickly lowered itself within 30 minutes and we trailed it almost right up to my front porch. It looked good near Greeley, Kansas (below) on US 169.

Greeley, Kansas Meso

And underneath this "chef's hat" meso (yes, I made up that term, but have used it several times lol) spun up a few vortices as it rotated fairly strongly. They were very thin ropes which lasted about 15-20 seconds at the most. The storm wasn't even tornado warned at the time and I guess Spotter Network needs to verify your password even though I was logged in...for me to make a report. I tried resetting the password and it said it was incorrect, so I don't know what's going on with that.

So I then tried dialing 911 as a last resort where it dropped my call at least 5 times. By the time I got service again, the 911 dispatcher left a voicemail and the storm wasn't as impressive despite having a nice BWER on radar. We continued to flank the storm debating whether to ditch our isolated supercell for the one immediately to our north but feared ours would seed it which was just SW of Baldwin City and had impressive rotation. Nah...our supercell and ingest all the low level CAPE...right,?....plus, the storms now trailing ours is congealing into a line...and we would have had to punch north through this one which might have taken time since the storm was moving northeast at 30 mph, and I liked our isolated HP storm.

....We continued to follow it to the south side of Hillsdale Lake where we drove underneath the rotation, accidentally, thanks to the road bending, but we managed to position ourselves for a decent view, and were treated to watching a ground-scraping meso that hovered above the lake water.

This photo below...on the horizon...if you put your left hand's thumb on the edge of those trees on the left, (positioned horizontally and to the right) you can see where there were weakly rotating rainbands, which I think was a weak waterspout (tornado over water, whatever!). Lots of turbulence going on ahead of that, but the storm continued to look outflow dominant and "cold." We are looking DOWN here (north) off the damn. Look closely at the cloud base vs. the lake water. I'm guessing 80 feet tops for the LCL's here...it was pulling scud off of trees as it moved past the lake.


Hillsdale Lake Possible Waterspout (Tornado over Water ;) )

Hillsdale Lake Wall cloud

We headed east, then flew north on US 169 to Spring Hill with this view (below) to our northeast. This is at 10 mm...the top of the updraft is actually right above us, as I shoot this straight out from my car. The area of interest is just where our paved road bends on the horizon and to the left. Updrafts looked identical to the July 29th supercell I saw, low-topped in nature and the same dark greenish-blue hue to it.

Spring Hill updraft

I was never concerned of anything even remotely strong impacting the southwest suburbs (now) of Kansas City. We head east to US 69 to south Overland Park where there are miles upon miles of $400,000 houses (and up!) in the path of this "cold" looking wall cloud heading directly at us at the 151st street exit. (Below)

Overland Park Wall Cloud

It's really pulling in scud on the right side of the photo (we are looking west) and forms a tail cloud. This sup has a more pronounced vault region to it on the right as well, than it did earlier...but still, a chaser knows this thing isn't going to produce. I clamped the video camera on the window mount and filmed, as heavy traffic is headed south at 5:40'ish nearly bumper to bumper. I wonder if any of these people knew what was going on. Sirens have been blaring and yet Mr. Joe Corporate is gonna get home, by golly, so he can grill him some steaks!

This thing passes directly over us with, at first westerly outflow winds at about 60 mph, bending the trees in front of us, with lots of rotation/strong turbulence on the cloud base that I can jump up and touch...and then a familiar switch back from the east at the same speed and Derek and I yell at the same time, seeing rotating rain bands crossing the highway and hitting my car for about 2 seconds...then it was over. A weak tornadic circulation that didn't even rival some straight-lined winds I've encountered before!

There's no way we could keep up with traffic and KU was playing in an hour, so we headed back to Olathe just in time to get a table at Johnny's with Derek's brother, Kevin and another guy, and watched radar until gametime. Not a bad chase at all! So much for not writing a detailed account!

So weak spinups that won't be counted by me as a tornado...since my views on counting tornadoes has changed. IMO, counting tornadoes is used to boost egos or to appear credible, etc, and with chasers counting tornadoes differently (and often times much HIGHER than actual), is irrelevant to me any more because I don't seek any of the above. It's successful intercept days that I count now vs. # of chases and today ranks as a 1/2/ ~30 this year.


Edit: That storm to our north that we blew off, Darin bagged a huge tornado after he left work (with no data). It produced EF-1 damage near Eudora, Kansas...a kick in the nuts to me since I had hyped this day up and blew it. Congrats to him.

The Okeeffe's were also chasing the same storm we were and have a report up.

Jon Davies
is the "man" as always, and did a post analysis case study for those interested in the conditions.

It was a day where you had to either compromise 0-3 km CAPE for the better helicity or vice versa....I didn't know if there was enough heating to begin with, so I chose the instability...our storm was on the southern edge of the good 0-1 km SRH ingesting maybe 100-150 tops, whereas (per spc mesoanalsyis) the "Eudora" tornado was further north, bullseyed in thejavascript:void(0) good stuff at around 250 m2/s2 SRH accompanied by a 40 knot LLJ. I still can't believe there was any instability there, having been there an hour before with cool temps and a socked in sky. Oh well.......


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Monday, September 08, 2008

Our Storm Chasing DVD Trailer

EDIT: I purchased the song for the trailer here at RevoStock.Com, they have the cheapest, best selections on the internet.

I'll probably take this down in a day or two, because it's not completely watermarked and Reed will upload it to youtube...

Friday, September 05, 2008

Another Kasatochi Sunset, Dense Fog and Fogbow



Another brilliant sunset last night, I'll never grow old of seeing a sky with a fiery glow to it. Evidently, this may be a regular thing for a period of time according to the experts.

I was up bright and early for the dense fog and finally saw the elusive fogbow. I was driving south on a county road and thought I saw something faint to the west so I snapped a quick picture and sure enough! Darin ended up being out taking pictures too and got some sweet fogbow pictures as well...we were at the exact location at the exact time (for a few minutes) and somehow didn't see each other. What's funny about that, is that it was Douglas County Lake...neither of us have talked or been to but a few times. I didn't see any steam hoses, but Mike did again...I'm really eager to see some of these...someday!

Some pictures below of Fogfest 2008 in northeast Kansas. I'm ready for a decent fall setup to chase soon, maybe even a cold-core setup later on that won't bust!

Fogbow

Fogbow

"Back to Basom"

Netty



I'm almost done with the trailer for the double DVD production of ours that should be ready by mid October.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Kasatochi Sunset/Sunrise Pictures



You know what really pisses me off with photography discussion online is these people who claim to know all of this shit about photography and then you look at their photos and are like, "hmmmm...sure buddy" Or the person who ask rhetorical questions of another's white balance! Looking at his avatar, maybe he thinks fluorescent is the way to go for shelf clouds. You can talk all you want as if you know what you're talking about...or what equipment you own (I love these people who are like I own "L" this, and "L" that), but the proof is in the picture.

Anywho, here are some more sunset/sunrise pictures from last week/weekend created by volcanic ash from the volcano Kasatochi in Alaska. It's clearing off here now, so I'm out the door to see if it's still gonna happen.

Kasatochi Sunset

Kasatochi Sunset

Kasatochi Sunrise



Anti-Crepuscular Rays Sunset

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midwesternmeso AT hotmail (DOT) COM

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