Good news on the book front

I was able to resurrect a fairly recent version of my 2009 chase photo book from some random backups on a thumb drive, so that effort has only been set back a few hours by my computer Armageddon of recent weeks. I'll be working diligently on this project over the next few weeks and hope to upload the manuscript to the Blurb.com website before the 2010 chase season begins. I'll be providing occasional status updates here as I make progress. Have to talk about something chase-related during the snowy months!

Looking forward to a New Year!

Hope all had a Merry Christmas and are anticipating a good New Year! I had been making good progress on the 2009 chase season pictorial review via the Booksmart application from Blurb.com, but the complete and utter laptop crash I suffered during the East Coast blizzard may have wiped that out completely. I'm still recovering and finding files I had backed up here and there so I may have a recent backup of the book file, but I'm not holding my breath. Looks like I'll be starting that project over!

Mid-Atlantic snow storm potential

Check out my general weather blog post for the latest on the upcoming Mid-Atlantic snowstorm. StormsRUs is focused on convective severe weather, while Fredericksburg Weather covers most other weather events.
Sometimes it's just nice to separate the two...

May 15 2009 gust front in Oklahoma

This picture reminded me of the awesome squall line that rumbled through Kansas and Oklahoma on May 15th, our last Plains chase day before I flew back home. We saw a lot that day, including many members of the Vortex 2 chase team, but we didn't see any tornadoes. I came across this picture while putting together a pictorial guide book for my 2009 chase season both out in the Plains and back here in Virginia. Most chasers seem to gravitate toward publishing DVDs/videos, but I lean toward hard copy as my preferred method of expression. Thus this will be my third chase-related book. Not many copies of my first two have sold, but that's not the reason I write and publish them.

It is a small world...

Last night I attended a Basics 1 Skywarn training as a refresher as I hadn't had a class since 2005. The briefer was Greg Schoor, one of the forecasters from the NWS Sterling office. During the first half of the class he mentioned he had graduated from the University of Oklahoma, so at the break I went up and told him my son had attended OU for a couple of years. It turns out he knows several people that my son hung out (and storm chased with) altho' he didn't recognize my son's name. Talk about a small world!
One thing of note that I learned last night is that NWS is setting up a weather radio transmitter on the top of Mary Washington Hospital to provide better coverage in the Fredericksburg area. Right now the closest transmitter is in Manassas and coverage in some of our more rural corners is spotty at best. Hopefully this new site will be operational by springtime and the 2010 chase season.

No storms, but some wind!

We didn't get any storms out of today's system, just lots of rain overnight and early morning. Now we're waiting for the cold front to punch through here and entertain us with wind gusts up to 50 mph. At the moment the front seems to have just crossed the Blue Ridge so it should be here within the next 90 minutes or so. SPC predictions of severe weather this time of year for the Mid-Atlantic are always to be taken with grain of salt, but hope abounds!

Thunderstorms and tornadoes(?) for eastern Virginia

This SPC graphic shows the potential for tornadoes through 7:00 am tomorrow morning. Given the predicted instability ahead of an approaching cold front and the available wind shear a few isolated tornadoes aren't out of the question for the eastern half of Virginia. Even tho' our specific area is outside this outline we are within a general thunderstorm area, but all this will happen overnight into the wee hours of tomorrow morning. I may wake up to see a flash of lightning or two, but there is no reason to get excited enough to think about chasing.

May 28th 2009 original wall cloud

Sitting here with snow melting - slowly - outside I needed a convective fix so I reviewed some photos from the May 28th King George county chase during which I witnessed a surprise funnel drop under a rain free base to the west. Prior to that I had been keeping an eye on a wall cloud to my east, of which two views are shown above, and I was also videoing. The feature was (a) sucking up scud and (b) almost stationary in the field of view as the parent cloud moved right-to-left (south-to-north). There were signs of rotation evident, but this wall cloud moved north and became rain-wrapped without dropping a funnel. After the rain obscured my view of it I turned westward and saw the aforementioned surprise funnel. Lesson learned? Don't give up on a chase just because the first interesting feature disappears. You never know what might show up next!