All cozied up here in my Ogallala hotel after following some storms up I-76 this afternoon.  Today’s forecast didn’t pan out like we thought with storms having better wheels and actually going severe for a time.  Initial thoughts on today were very slow moving Urban Corridor storms that would produce flash flood potential from Denver and points north.  While there was a brief window for some minor street flooding in southeast Denver, the storms had more juice to them, thus propagated northeast much quicker, leaving the areal residence time too low for major impacts fortunately.  That also meant the cluster…

Last few days of July MAY offer up a chase day or two locally… nothing terribly high-end, but close enough to home to where it could certainly get me on the road.  I had today on the radar, and while it still sits there, the probabilities are definitely toward the bottom.  Overnight showers and a couple thunder rumbles lingered into the morning, and as we approach lunch, the overcast conditions are holding strong here in northern Colorado, greatly reducing any storm potential here.  Out east, a little better, but you’re now talking 2-3 hour drive to get out that way…

Added another tick mark to my tropical adventures… a forgettable one… was mostly mop-up work in Texas on what I assume was the very remote off-chance SOMETHING would have happened after its unspectacular landfall in Louisiana.  Nothing I personally would’ve even given a second thought, but sometimes the nature of the job calls.  That being said, it was everything we knew it would be, and by everything, I mean literally nothing.  I’ve seen bigger downpours in my shower.  But alas, I was there, it’s another name off the list, nothing bad happened, and it was quick and painless.  I’m home,…

Monsoon returned to northern Colorado this evening and I brought out my lightning trigger and cashed the hell in on it!  The shot above was one of several strikes caught on my Nikon this evening on a very impromptu outing about a third of the way through the Rockies game.  At home with a car in my lap, watching storms fire along the Front Range on radar when they finally started sparking.  I set up north of Johnstown and got some good shots looking west (speaking of composite images haha).  But the shot of the night was a window hand-held…

Shooting lightning, as I’ve mentioned only about a bajillion times in the past, is my favorite aspect of storm chasing.  For me, this was REALLY where I got my start as my first couple summers in Colorado gave me many opportunities to capture lightning as I was still in the infancy of my severe weather career.  Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, all my shooting was done on film cameras, namely a Canon AE-1.  I don’t know exactly when digital SLRs came into the public grasp, but it would be many years before I would get my hands…

The heat of July continues, the doldrums, as we like to call them, and aside from the lightning/hail venture on the first day of the month, there has been ZERO to chase, and I’m not all too upset by it.  The time off has been nice, and I can gradually feel the itch starting to return, but it doesn’t look as if Ma-Nature’s itch to get me out is on the same level.  So… I figured I would look back on the first half of the year and offer up my awards to this point.  I will include the July…