Summer Convection

Had a nice ten mile 'chase' yesterday. A summer instability driven thunderstorm pulsed up north of town during the mid-afternoon. I was initially uninterested and actually spent the next hour at the gym (periodically checking radar, of course... I'm not -that- out of it). Walking out I was pleased to see the towers still erupting to my north. I went home and checked radar to get a better feel for where things were popping and what storm motions were going to be. My financial situation right now and a couple maintenance issues on the vehicle don't allow for a bunch of "just for fun" driving but it was apparent that the storm to my north would be crawling toward me, so I figured it would be silly not to venture out to my little view point south of Urbana.

Since I really went around the same two or three square mile country road grid during the entire hour or two I was out there, I won't write up about any specific and will just post some photos.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

The entire flickr set is available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/prairiestormmedia/sets/72157627166180513/

Annoyingly blogger posts all of these photos in a jumbled order, so the time sequence is off here.

This is looking to my south toward the farm house that has already been featured several times before.


All I could hear at this point was a loud whooshing roar from the precipitation shaft to my east. This is at super wide 10 mm, so while it looks somewhat distant here, I was actually just a stones throw from being soaked.


The ole farmstead to my south upon initially arriving at my spot. Amazing how quickly things change from this, to the first image above. Summertime in the midwest!


This is looking northeast toward the storm, again, after first arriving out at my sitting spot.


The storm is probably at one of its strongest points right now as it makes one final surge before dying out.



Summer in Illinois. I'm sure I will miss this eventually once I am finally able to leave this state. I'm not sure what it is about this image, but even though it's only existed for less than 24 hours I get very nostalgic looking at it.

Late Wisconsin night sky update

Not going to write a lot, but did come away from the trip up to Wisconsin with a couple decent night sky photos. I originally started with that static shot posted below, and was going to trail the stars in the southern sky, but my family lit up a bonfire to my north so I quickly abandoned that first shot and spun around and trailed the north sky.