Jenn and the abandoned house

I went out and did another modeling shoot with my friend Jenn last weekend, the target being my favorite old abandoned house in rural Champaign County. I was initially under the impression that it had burned to the ground during a fire mid-last week after I had just made plans to go back and shoot it over the coming weekend. Luckily I was able to determine it was a separate house that had burned down, and that I was still in business. My friend Jenn is also into photography, and is great with the entire modeling/portrait realm so I recruited her to help me out on a Sunday adventure. She's a posing pro and made my job quite easy!

Here's the entire flickr set... http://www.flickr.com/photos/prairiestormmedia/sets/72157629309075392/

Even more time lapsing

Had another round of thunderstorms move into the area down in Champaign on Saturday evening. I was able to shoot about an hours worth of time lapse of the two intersecting boundaries surging toward me until it finally started raining at my location and I had to pack things up.

Youtube has been acting weird on my end, so I tossed the TL on vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/38743198

Time lapse of nocturnal convection

Some little cells began pulsing along an outflow boundary that was surging toward town. Originally I thought about going to the moraine south of town where I'd have a clear view to the west. When I started driving out of town I could see all kinds of cumulus being illuminated by the city lights. I immediately changed my plan and decided that I'd time lapse the convection being brightly illuminated by the light pollution. Eventually lightning began popping off. I was in sky heaven!

Here's a little time lapse snippet.

Nikki and the rogue severe thunderstorm

I went down to visit with an old friend today, and I knew for a fact that she was a girl who loved having her picture taken so she let me use her for another rough go at portrait photography. We tossed around a couple of location ideas, but ultimately just ended up using a couple of old barns near her family's place. I'll have a bigger flickr set in a few days, but for now I'll throw a couple of photos below.

Afterward while having dinner with her family, a couple of rogue thunderstorms erupted to the southwest and went severe warned. I think the closer of the two storms produced 1.50" hail at one point. Anyway, catching wind of this I quickly went outside to take a peak and decided that I would need to intermittently pop out of the house to snap a few photos. It was quite spectacular during the twilight hours as it died, with the Venus and Jupiter conjunction overhead.





One of my best friends is getting married on Friday so I won't have time to think about my camera for a couple of days, but I'm told the weekend into next week look fun storm wise in the middle part of the country.

I-80 Supercell Threat

Somewhat of a surprise event today (surprise, because I haven't been paying attention) in NE Illinois. I just came back down to Champaign yesterday evening, so I'm actually in decent position for this. Current target right now is around the Kankakee area, so I'm perhaps just a jaunt up Interstate 57 away from some fun later this evening.

A compact upper level wave is currently swinging through the region, and has already sparked off a line of elevated thunderstorms in NW Illinois. Surface reflection of this upper level wave is pretty weak, and that is my main concern at the moment.

It feels like a chase day when stepping outside here in Champaign, with temperatures already warming into the lower to middle 60s, and dew points approaching the upper 50s. Low level moisture can be seen screaming northward in the rapidly moving low level clouds racing from south to north overhead. This should continue through the afternoon as the atmosphere slowly begins to prime. 0-3 km cape values of 50-100 k/jg are already in place north of Interstate 74 in northern Illinois, and this should continue to increase toward evening.

It looks like as we may see an increase in surface convergence as evening approaches, and this may be enough to squeeze out an isolated strong storm or two near Interstate 80 in northeast Illinois. Upper level support will be there to support organized severe storms.

These best risk for more widespread storms this evening seems to be in Michigan, but that obviously is not something I'm considering doing. With increasing surface convergence toward sunset, and the potential for a lingering boundary or two, I am hoping for the development of one or two strong to severe storms on the tail end, near Interstate 80. That being said, I'm not sure if this isn't more of a wish-cast than a forecast. Trying to avoid that mindset. There are a lot of things going against me seeing a storm south of Interstate 80 today.

It'll be play it by ear time, so go ahead and just follow the old twitter for my back and forth, hot and cold updates. For now we'll call my target a Dwight to Kankakee line, an hour or two before sunset.

https://twitter.com/#!/PStormImagery

Another aurora dud

After an X5 solar flare earlier in the week, hopes were high for an aurora borealis display on Thursday. Unfortunately, the CME from the flare hit the Earth sometime early on Thursday during the daylight hours, and on top of that the magnetic field was aligned in the opposite manner that would be favorable for a lights display in the sky. Even so, there was the chance that the field would reverse and we would be in luck. Heather Brinkmann and I headed out from DeKalb once the data started flipping around weirdly, and had a very faint low green band on the horizon again, similar to what we saw last month.

This didn't last long however, and we spent almost two hours out there waiting in vein for the sky to catch fire. Hoping to time lapse the arrival of the aurora I kept the camera going, and ultimately just ended up with a long star trail sequence.

This would have been a pretty sweet foreground for an aurora display, so I guess I will just have to keep it in mind for later.

March 2nd Indiana Intercept

Only a week to the day late, but here are the two images that sum up my first chase of 2012. I had originally planned on chasing in southern Illinois, intercepting storms shortly after they developed near St. Louis. I left DeKalb in the northern part of the state around 8:30 AM, and this apparently was still too late. By 10 AM there is a healthy supercell approaching my original target, and I was still an hour plus away. With storms moving at 60 mph or faster, there was no getting in front of this stuff before it hit the Wabash River and crossed into Indiana. So, along Interstate 74 I made the decision to carry on eastward into Indiana, and then drop south at some point to get ahead of the storms.

I took I-74 to Crawfordsville, IN before flying south on I believe it was 231. The tail end storm looked like it wanted to take off, and one of my chase partners Mark Sefried even submitted a report that noted some rotation beginning to take shape. I decided that I would pick the storm up around Spencer, IN, southwest of Indianapolis. Out of curiosity I pulled up the Google Maps terrain imagery for this area and just started laughing. I'd be intercepting in the middle of a forest, literally. Not that this wasn't already a good possibility when I left the house in the morning. Much to my disbelief, I suddenly emerged into this incredible clearing a top a hill that overlooked the entire forest. And low and behold, there was my storm base to the southwest, along with a mean bow echo to my west and northwest.

I got out to watch the storm approach me, but it became quickly evident that the bow echo was surging ahead and the associated cold outflow was going to be stealing the show and choking off any hope for tornado time. Outflow winds were not even very intense, and I picked up some pea to dime sized hail before my day was over.

Prairiestorm IMAGERY

Prairiestorm Media is dead. Sort of. I had been toying with dropping the 'media' tag for a while, and decided now that my actual main website had been fairly irrelevant for a while now it was a decent time to make the switch. The entire site was down for almost a month and only two people actually said anything about it to me, so I don't think anyone was missing it too much.

Anyway, PrairiestormImagery.Com it is! Everything else is essentially 100% the same. My content has been more atmospheric imagery based than anything media related for a while now, so the name needed tweaked. I made the push to be less associated with media chasers and focus more on creative ways to capture the sky that I love over the last year or two, so the change makes sense.

For what it's worth - I do need to credit my brother in all of this, Colin Davis, on the name change idea. I was struggling with what to actually change it to... Prairiestorm WHAT? Imagery was so obvious that it never even dawned on me. Luckily he's around for some of those common sense moments.

To celebrate the change, here are a couple photos from last week. I went out to time lapse what I figured would be a decent sunset, and wound up stalking a convective snow shower across the county during my favorite hour of twilight after the sun had set.

Aurora and afternoon time lapse

I started the afternoon driving around aimlessly looking for a place to test out my new intervalometer, so I can start time lapsing like an adult. I wound up driving to a new addition to the Mendota Hills wind farm, about 20 minutes away from DeKalb. The hard part about time lapsing with wind turbines is that it's hard to get the blades to not look ridiculous turning and twitching at weird rates. Since this is a new addition the turbines aren't active yet so they just glide in the wind. Unfortunately even with a specific times interval between shots they still managed to turn and glide at random intervals stopping and starting again.

At they very least it was cool to see the dramatic directional shear in the atmosphere that afternoon as the low level clouds streamed out of the northeast, with upper level clouds shooting from west to east.

Later that evening while hanging with some friends I happened to check facebook and see that Chris Allington was reporting visible aurora down to the Nebraska and South Dakota border. Up here in northern Illinois that isn't a whole lot further north. Actually now that I finally look at a map, that's pretty dead on as far as latitude is concerned. You see, this is exactly why I can't bring myself to give up facebook. I go through spurts of being tired of it and think that I don't actually need it, and should get rid of it altogether. But for random updates of cool things in the sky that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of at times like this, I just can't do it. You know what's even funnier about last night, is that I woke up in a really weird mood yesterday that I could only describe as violently strong cabin fever. I woke up and immediately needed to leave the house and this area altogether. I began brain storming where within a couple of hours driving I could go that would be a change of scenery. Around here, a couple hours of driving will generally put you somewhere that looks just like the place that you started out. I tossed around driving to Starved Rock and doing some time lapse down there... then I was very close to driving up to the cabin in Wisconsin and visiting the lake and just doing night time lapses up there. Had I done that I would have been in great position, and already been photographing when the aurora display appeared. Ah well.

By the time I was alerted, grabbed the cameras and headed back out, the display was down to a faint green band on the horizon.



Funny story while out waiting on the aurora to potentially flare back up by myself. I generally don't spook at all even while out in the middle of the night by myself. I'm not sure if I'm just used to it or not. Either way, I get out of my car and the power lines are making this eerie buzzing noise. I shrugged it off and got the camera out and started shooting anyway. Then I heard two packs of coyotes start yelping on either side of me, and then the farm dog that is barking at the farm about half a mile up the road starts growling and snarling as if spooked/attacked. I paused for a moment to listen to my surroundings, but ultimately decided to hold my ground and continue shooting. Anyway, I just figure if that didn't send me running back to the car then I'm pretty sure not a lot will.

Of course once I start heading off from that spot, what is obviously a local county deputy pulled in behind me and quickly pulled me over. I didn't have my wallet on me because I had run out of the house so quickly to take photos, and when I told him that he replied with "take photos??". I told him that yes, the aurora was visible earlier and that my camera was in my backseat if he wanted to check. What was funny was immediately after that he asked if I was going to school for meteorology here. Not entirely sure how he gathered that up.

Reflections countdown... bat in CD's house

Last February I counted down the days until March 1st by posting one overlooked photo each day. Most in the weather community are aware by now that the world of storm chasing lost an amazing person on Saturday evening, when Andy Gabrielson was killed in a head on collision on the Oklahoma Turnpike. When I first read the text message informing me that he had been killed I had the initial moment of "no, that certainly can't be right." followed by a huge wave of sadness upon realizing that the dude really was gone, and how different things would be this spring. I began texting one of my closest friends in storm chasing, and really more of a brother, Colin Davis, about the situation. Ultimately, what the accident made me do was spend the rest of the night reflecting on all the great times I spent with my friends while on the chase. Every day really is a miracle, and you should take advantage of every moment that you get to spend with your loved ones.

I thought an interesting way to expand on the entire reflection idea was to actually go back and write about some of these more memorable moments. So, for every day until we finally hit March, I'll be posting a stupid little story that has stuck with me over the years. Essentially I'm telling you to enjoy reading three weeks worth of inside jokes.

On August 17 2004, I rode along with Colin Davis, Scott Kampas, and Dennis DeBourbon on a marginal day in NW Illinois. We were almost suckered into Iowa but held local and eventually chased a couple of supercells that produced decent lowerings but never came overly close to producing a tornado. After dark, more thunderstorms began popping up so once we returned to Colin's place in Canton we got the cameras back out to film the light show. We were informed upon heading into the house that a bat had entered the place. This was the second bat in a week for them, actually. I of course, got the camera back out and began filming the bat swooping around the kitchen before it bolted for the doorway I was standing in and put me on my back. Colin was standing in the next doorway and had the bat swoop around him a couple of times before flying up the stairs to the second floor.

After crouching on the floor with the bat flying laps for another minute or so the bat finally flew into the bathroom where Colin was able to trap it. One of my all-time favorite dialogue exchanges happens now between Colin and Denny. Dennis was rambling about needing to come up with a plan and that we were just moving it around the house. He began telling us to get a battle plan or let us play with it all night, and then replied with "because I don't like bats" when asked why he doesn't help with the plan. Colin then mumbles something else back about him just letting us work on it, before getting "Oh yeah, sounds like you've got a great plan" from Denny, to which he replies "Oh yeah, better than yours, 'I don't like bats!'" I wish I had the video available on a format where I could throw it online or something, because I know the 'you had to be there' aspect of the story doesn't help, and me conveying it thru text isn't helping any.

Eventually, we were able to get the bathroom window open and coaxed it to fly out while I filmed from behind the toilet.

Anyway, I can already tell that this idea is going to be a lot of me laughing as I type old stories, while you decide to stop reading this blog until I get back to posting legitimate storm chasing posts.