A-Basin Lift Chair

Amanda and Mabs love 'lifty', our new lift chair porch bench!

Eastern CO Bow Echo Chase

The storm really intensified as it neared Limon, CO. We met up with Jon M and Shawn along hw71 here.

Storm crosses hw 71 north of Limon, CO. Golfball size hail was reported south of Limon.

Michael and I check out the forward flank shelf cloud with many eddies in it and spinups.


Interesting lowerings on the north side of the storms, we saw this kind of updraft feature a few times today at different locations. We made it out past Flaggler before calling it a night and trying (unsuccessfully) for some lightning shots.

Severe Storms Thursday Night

Models are showing storms firing over the Palmer Divide and heading east from 5:00pm to 10:00pm at night. Michael and I will be going out and chasing supercells. We should atleast get some good lightning shots!

...CNTRL HIGH PLAINS... WHILE STRONG MOISTURE RETURN DOES NOT APPEAR LIKELY ACROSS THE REGION...MODEST BOUNDARY LAYER MOISTENING WILL OCCUR NEAR LEE-TROUGH AND ADVANCING COLD FRONT FROM SWRN NEB SWD ALONG CO/KS BORDER. SURFACE DEWPOINTS AROUND 60F AND TEMPERATURES CLIMBING THROUGH THE 80S WILL CONTRIBUTE TO MODERATE DESTABILIZATION WITH LAPSE RATES STEEPENING WITH DAYTIME HEATING. MEAN LAYER CAPE ON THE ORDER OF 1500 J/KG IS ANTICIPATED BY AFTERNOON...WHEN FORCING NEAR INTERSECTION OF COLD FRONT AND SURFACE TROUGH/WEAK DRY LINE SHOULD LOCALLY ELIMINATE CAPPING ASSOCIATED WITH ELEVATED MIXED LAYER. WEAK BUT VEERING WINDS WITH HEIGHT FROM LOWER TO MID-LEVELS...BENEATH MODERATE WESTERLY HIGH LEVEL FLOW...SHOULD PROVE ADEQUATE FOR ISOLATED SUPERCELLS WITH HAIL AND HIGH WINDS. ADDITIONAL ACTIVITY WITH SEVERE HAIL POTENTIAL MAY ALSO OCCUR IN RELATIVELY MOIST POST-FRONTAL UPSLOPE FLOW REGIME FROM NEB PNHDL TO THE CO FRONT RANGE.

August 26, 2006 Eastern CO chase

Eric shoots the storm from Cedar Point, CO as it moves towards us rapidly from the west.

We were hit with incredibly strong outflow winds from this storm, upwards of 60kts!

Street flooding under I-70 at Deer Trail!

Michael films the street flooding up close.

End of the day lightning from the tornado warned cell coming out of Pueblo.

Tornado warned cell over Pueblo!

Latest image from Verne's mobile picture phone tornado warning! We were thinking that our chase was done when we saw Pueblo go tornado warned and 'We're Gone!'

Playing around with Photo Borders

Created this digital photo frame in photoshop tonight so that I can frame my favorite pictures. I titled this one "Fan of Fire"

May 26, 2006 Elbert County Funnels

Tornadoes over Bennett, CO!

I just watched and videoed this tornado over Bennett that was visible from all the way up at our house in Coal Creek Canyon (50 miles away - line of site). This tornado was on the ground for up to 5 minutes. Michael and Eric were out chasing today and were able to get much closer shots and video! More pics to come soon!

The A-Basin Ski Lift Chair Restoration Project

I was surprised to find that these chairs came from the manufacturer with yellow vinyl seat covers. At some point they were stapled over with black vinyl. I will be replacing the pad and cover with the black operational vinyl.

Getting a true piece of history, I was lucky enough to buy old ski lift chair #23 that spent many decades shuttling skiers and snowboarders on the Lenawee lift at Arapahoe Basin, Colorado! In 2001 the old two person Lenawee lift was taken down in favor of a new higher speed three chair. Over the next few days and weeks I will be restoring her to her former glory with a new coat of paint, new knee board, and all new padding and vinyl cover. When all done, this chair will become our new front porch seat.

Lightning over Downtown Denver

Tonight I was lucky enough to catch a couple bolts of lightning that lit up downtown Denver. This picture was taken from the window of my livingroom.

May 23, 2006 Tornado Video for the SLS Conference

Another video for the SLS conference, in this video we chase numerous gustnadoes including a large one at the end of the day that tossed a water tank across I-29 as it passed in front of us.

Here's the actual link to the wmv file:


May 23, 2006 SD

May 7, 2006 Tornado Video for the SLS Conference

This video is the one that I made for the November Severe Local Storms Conference in St. Louis, MO. It is 4 minutes long and includes approach of the Scott City tornado as well as the Garden City funnel and reported night time tornado that formed as the storm passed beyond the city. A link to the actual video is here:

May 7, 2006 Garden City Video

Storm over the Flatirons in Boulder

Latest image from Verne's mobile picture phone. A nice little cell just popped up over the flatirons of Boulder at lunch. Had some nice low-level structure and lightning.

Another lightning pic makes into onto Denver's 7!

Tonight Mike Nelson showed this lightning shot of mine on the 10pm weather segment. This is one of my better lightning examples and I was happy to see that Mike thinks so too. I was able to record it on my DVR so tomorrow night I will put up a post of the actual broadcast.
Here is a zoom of the bolt on the right where you can see it hitting some kind of structure.

Testing out Audio Blogging

What is Storm Chasing?

I was asked to write this up by Emily Benedict with www.thisisthelife.com in London. Here is what I see as a description of storm chasing for the novice.

Each spring from April to June in the central plains of the United States a great battle goes on between the cold Canadian air and the warm humid gulf air advancing to the north. It is here in the normally flat and tranquill farm land that structures of cloud as high as mount Everest form and march to the east transforming the landscape and providing colors and features not seen anywhere on earth. Storm Chasing is a very exciting adventure where if you arm yourself with enough meteorological information and have the latest in computer and cell phone data at your disposal you can place yourself in proximity to these events but keep yourself at a safe distance. By learning how storms form and what conditions create the best dynamics, storm chasers get themselves by mid-afternoon to within 50 miles of the 'target zone'. Here clues in the sky in the form of developing towers tell where boundaries lie and where storms will form and where to adjust your position for the show to come. By late afternoon a couple of isolated supercells will have formed and begun to be caught by the upper winds and have started to move to the northeast. By 'playing' along infront of the storm and staying to the east and south the storm chaser puts themselves in the best position to see the most intense part of the storm - the updraft. It is here in the updraft that the rapidly rising air causes the cloud base to seath and writhe and take on greens and blacks as little fingers of cloud known as scud reach to the ground. If the storm is strong enough and the conditions are right, this updraft area will begin to rotate and a tornado will form. A tornado is culmination of all the ingredients in the storm structure coming together and focussing all of it's energy into one perfect vortex of energy. Many people come away from seeing a tornado as somehow changed, as feeling like thier problems are small in scale compared to the power of nature. Like an apparition in the dark, you cannot belive what you are seeing. You look around at the others with you to make sure they are seeing what you see. Seeing a tornado is like seeing a visitor from another planet, it seems like something that should not exist in the natural world but yet it does.

Morning Thunder!

Around 1:20am I awoke to small flashes of light to the north and I quickly rose from bed and spent the next 4 hours shooting some of the best lightning so far this season! Here are some of the best shots.

Distant Lightning over Ft. Morgan, CO

This shot was taken on maximum zoom on my 150mm lens. These are the lights of Brighton with lightning just west of Ft. Morgan in the background. Notice the little needle in the cloud bottom.

Fast moving storm comes out of the mountains

A disturbance in WY was progged to move southeast into CO between 10pm and midnight tonight and right on queue a fast moving storm came in over the Indian Peaks wilderness and made it's way down into southern Denver. These are among the best shots I got tonight.

Location of my first significant tornado, Edgemont, SD May 11, 1991

This weekend Amanda and I traveled up to Spearfish, SD for her triathalon and spent the weekend exploring the Black Hills of South Dakota.On the way back I was able to go the route I used to take back from Caving at Wind Cave National Park (another whole story). It was onone of these return trips on May 11, 1991 that I saw my first significant tornado just west of Edgemont, SD on HW 18. This is a picture ofthe exact location where I first saw the beginnings of what would be the large cone tornado that Robert Phillips, Bill Hawn and myself would watch from the side of the road at this spot. I had seen funnels and tornadoes from a distance before this but this would be theone that really cemented it for me and had me hooked forever!

Edit: I was able to find this tornado on www.tornadohistoryproject.com and found that it was an F1 along with two other F0 touchdowns. This also let me narrow the date to May 11th.