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:

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.