Top Storm Photos of 2009

Even though there might be a small chance for severe weather in the next week or two, I thought I'd post my favorite storm photos of 2009. I was lucky enough to capture some decent shots in 2009, especially tornadoes. And despite the crappy year that a lot of chasers have had, we've had probably our best year yet...intercepting tornadoes in every month from March until July. Here is a link to last year's top photos.

A 'firenado' back on March 6th, almost as good as the real thing up close:



April 26th, near Roll/Crawford, OK:



May 6th, 2009 in Linn County, KS a brilliant sunlit wall cloud and rainbow beneath a low-topped supercell...one that didn't even make it into the reports, but is forever etched into my mind:



May 30th, Clinton Lake Dam, KS, Lightning shot with the moon setting underneath the updraft :



June 15th, 2009 near Kinsley, KS:



June 17th, amazing structure just west of Grand Island, Nebraska (wish I were just about 2 miles further east) :



June 17th, the Aurora, Nebraska tornado as it begins to cross back north of the highway...a few miles west of Aurora:



June 20th, Princeton Kansas 'mothership' supercell which produced several, weak, brief tornadoes, but the structure stole the show:

Storm Photos of the Day

June 20th, Near Princeton, Kansas. Dealt with fog on my lens quite a bit, was a real bitch to keep off.

Fabian Guerra, 6/7/2009 Chase Report

Edit: Tornado pictures today in Nevada County, Missouri (Russel Parsons)

As Darin and I were busting in West Central Iowa this past Saturday, we learned that a fellow chaser, Fabian Guerra passed away on his way to pick up another chaser in Des Moines the night before. According to the police report, a deer jumped out in front of him, causing him to swerve across the median and then proceeded to hit a semi. I knew Fabian as one of the first chasers in the community and met him on a couple of occasions, once in 2005 and the night of the Greensburg tornado in 2007. We also chatted quite a bit in an old storm chaser chatroom about upcoming chases. Dennis Sherrod has set up a memorial fund, which you can donate to here. He will be missed.

On Sunday, Darin, Lexi, Eric and I jumped on a pair of supercells, that failed to produce anything other than extremely large hail from Pawnee City, and the second from Oregon, MO eastward. Here's a video of my car being destroyed by copious amounts of mostly 2" hail with a few baseballs towards the end near Pawnee City. We were trapped in the hail core thanks to some freaked out farmers who were trying to back their horse trailers into a farm nearby. I couldn't get around them for several minutes as we could hear the hail roar and it cost me 2 new cracks and hundreds of dents into my car.



Here are a few shots of the first supercell (Pawnee City, NE), I have yet to process any from the other.







Yesterday was a big bust, with a cold outflow boundary that fooled us into thinking it wasn't cold. The storm we were on displayed supercell structures, a couple of brief, tiny funnels and for the most part, looked cold and outflowish from the getgo.

Lightning Photos + More Roll/Crawford Oklahoma Tornado Photos

I was half asleep in bed at midnight on the 31st when I saw lightning flashes along the apartment next door. Checked radar and noticed some storms firing along a retreating cold front (?) or a moisture axis (?), or perhaps it was the WAA regime along a stalled front (but was sure it settled much further south of Lawrence) . I briefly checked SPC's mesoanalysis and saw that Lawrence was right on the northern end of 2000 j/kg of MUCAPE and a dewpoint difference of about 10-12 degrees along this boundary.

I zipped to the Clinton dam where Darin, Lexi and I sat in lawn chairs shooting photos for almost an hour and a half. The one and only close CG we saw is below and was shot at 10 mm. The first updraft had some decent structure as you can see (but was better after). If you look closely on the reflection of the water just to the left of the strike, there are 4 fisherman on the shore there. The half moon just happened to be under the updraft base and luckily was rain-free. Shot at my usual, lazy 30 sec exposure, ISO 200 and f/4. Darin, 9 times out of 10, is usually the one who pulls the sweet lightning shots, but my 2009 luck was with me again. There really wasn't much lightning at all for the last 30 minutes we were there as the storms weakened, but of course pulsed back up after we had left.



I'm just as lazy at processing photos as I am blog entries, so here are a few more shots from April 26th in Roger Mills county, Oklahoma.

First funnel we could see that lasted only about 20 seconds, no ground circulation was visible from our vantage point. Taken at 20 mm or so. I should just ditch my Sigma 17-70 any more as this UWA is starting quarterback every chase now and there hasn't been much need for the 17-70.



Then about 30 seconds after the first tornado formed:



Then a not-so-great shot out of the window for the second (or third depending on who you ask) tornado. I had to bump both cams up to 800 ISO again, which can be a noisemaker. If I had a full frame camera, like many other chasers possess, I could step up the quality to another level. So if anyone reading this would like to purchase me the Canon 5d Mark II, I'd probably let you!



Now it's time to blow off a little steam by ranting on a Douglas county resident in which I was blessed to have crossed paths with .

Old man in Lawrence last week. I passed a new, silver Mercedes Benz SUV last week casually, on cruise control @ 79 mph about 2 miles east of Lawrence. I noticed he had a bumper sticker on it which read, "Arrogance: When Yes We Can turned into I won." So immediately I think this guy and I probably wouldn't be best friends forever. So I think, is he a successful small business owner who hires illegal aliens for cheap labor yielding huge profits, yet votes against illegal immigration? Or, is he some corporate executive who recently laid off 20 of his employees to make sure he still had enough cash in accounts payable to help continue to feed his addiction for his high-class call girls, or, the pointless, monthly business meetings which are centered at the top tourist attractions across the globe? Who knows.

I've now slowed down to 60 mph as I'm entering east Lawrence off of K-10 and notice Dick Cheney's #1 fan riding immediately behind me and is on my ass, not the 10-15 foot stuff, the 2-3 foot stuff. This makes for braking safely, for the posted 45 mph, nearly impossible now. I gently push my brakes, which instantly throws him into a rage, as he swerves over into the right lane to pass, then subsequently cuts me off purposely to get in front of me. He's now breaking the law at 20 mph over. Road rage is very contagious at this point, so I punch it, showing him the more skilled way, of riding someone's at 65 mph in a 45 (Yep, I'm breaking the law now too).

Five years ago, without hesitation, this guy's new Mercedes SUV would have had a custom-made, size 13 shoe souvenir engraved into the driver's side door. But, I elected to even things differently, watching him panic then trying to lose me for a good mile. He finally ducked into a gas station at the last second and I continued on. So if you're reading this, piss up a rope buddy!

We're off to Colorado tomorrow, not thrilled again for this weekend's setup, but it beats any pattern we've been in, in the last month. Probably be a week or two of cap busts from Mother Nature for her grand finale of a not-so chaser friendly year. When summer rolls around I hope to have more time processing photos.

More 5/6 Photos & 5/7 Chase Account

I finally got around to processing a few more photos from Wednesday and Thursday's chases. Wednesday ended up being the better day, but Thursday produced decent LP, low-topped structure (again) and a nonstop lightning barrage for nearly 2 hours.

Below is a photo of the western updraft on Wednesday (there's one outside of the photo to the left). It was about 20 minutes after the first tiny reflectivity return that showed up on radar.



We move south and east from Paola while these two cells begin to finally strengthen! We watch it for a bit then reposition south again while looking back to the northwest at this (below).



At first, it looked kind of elongated, high-based and a little outflow-ish, but we noticed an inflow band forming and feeding in from the southeast. The sun is just enough in the way to make the dynamic range, to shoot photos, a real bitch at this point. About 10 minutes later the base begins to look a little more round (below).



In the photo above you can barely make out that inflow band located at the top right of the photo, which is always a good sign!

We drop south to get out of the precip and about 15 minutes later we pull off on some county road to get a closer look. There are a LOT of trees in Linn County, KS, and the roads/hills are nearly as bad as Missouri, which of course is only 20-30 miles to our east :).



The horses paid no attention to the oncoming storm and were more concerned with us than it. In the photo above, you can see the ghosting (green/red flare) in the picture from having to aim near the sun.

The lighting is pretty much spectacular at this point, displaying a full spectrum of colors. About 10 minutes later, to the right of the image (above), is a huge tree row which we can barely see above, (looking north) but notice what looks like RFD cutting in slowly and a lot of scud being pulled up into the updraft.



Notice the blue skies behind the updraft/precip core. Behind us, thousands...millions of bright red raindrops are gently falling from the sky, making the scene very surreal. All of these shots, BTW are at 10 mm, so we're a lot closer than it appears.

About 3 minutes later, the photo I posted in my previous blog post of the wall cloud is now visible. There's hardly any rotation at this point, just a lot of scud being pulled in rapidly to our east...as we head east. Below, I snapped this photo while driving, a few moments later.



We pretty much drove underneath it (we wouldn't have, had we not felt it was safe to) continuing east as it moves southeast. We're getting into heavy rain east of the developing wall cloud and were surrounded (a full 360 degrees) by a mesmerizing, deep reddish hue of everything...trees, rain, grass, etc. Thanks to that, we lost focus of our road options and missed our south road option. We had just started to turn back around and noticed these, once harmless, rain curtains being forced 180 degrees rapidly back to the west. It was making me nervous because our view of the wall cloud was now obstructed by them. But luckily, we made it south out of the rain and noticed that the wall cloud was now rotating fairly decent and tightened up a couple of times.

We continued to trail it to the south avoiding the rain which eventually wrapped around it, obscuring our view. Our south road also turned back west away from the storm but thankfully the storm weakened, so we shifted our focus over to photographing the structure. My previous blog entry was the first structure shot I took and below is the second a little later on and slightly west.



Even though the storm weakened a lot within 30 minutes, it continued to display great structure. We continued south and then east to Prescott, Kansas where we would shoot our last photos of the night.



The next day, Thursday, wasn't as cool as the night before. We intercepted a storm near St. Joseph, Missouri that had serious problems sustaining itself and noticed numerous pileus clouds above the updrafts. Below is a photo of where it finally starts to sustain itself near Cameron, Missouri.



Trying to shoot bright white cloud tops with a pitch black base is nearly impossible without either: blowing the whites out on the updrafts, or underexposing the foreground and the base. I had to meter the scene using my XSI's live view and it still didn't help much.

We continued to chase this storm-turned-supercell all the way to Marshall, Missouri till about 11 p.m., trying to get some lightning photos with the low topped structure and an emerging full moon. You can see the rays of the moonlight in the photo below.




It went on to produce baseball-sized hail as it made its way into the Ozarks.

Not much to look at for chasing prospects in the immediate future thanks to zonal flow in place for nearly a week now, with no signs of life even on the extended models. It could be a slow May!