Storm over the foothills flickered for a while before putting on the show of the year, me capturing multiple INCREDIBLY detailed shots! Including what I would easily consider my lightning shot of the year!
Tony's Blogbach, Between the Isobars
Monday is the Target
Monday is the target day, the start of the ‘Second Season’ of chasing… while unlikely the last chase of the season, this will mark the home stretch of this season minus whatever El Nino has to serve up, particularly across the south/southeast through the winter. It’s an all-hazards setup, but with multiple caveats. In fact, this has been highlighted in the SPC 15% since the Day 5, and we awakened this morning to the 15% dropped to an all-marginal, only for the SLIGHT to come back in the afternoon Day 3. I don’t know why they opted to drop the…
Polished Up Front Page, All Log Types Live
Been a busy stretch behind-the-scenes as I continued to bring the website up to spec. I spent several hours yesterday evening polishing up the front page after adding the remaining post types to the site. I’m about 90% of the way to finally making it so all that’s left to do is content generation, getting decades of weather logs up and running. I have a lot of placeholders up to help me as I tweak site layouts, but soon I will begin to finally get all the archive content polished up and posted! It’s super exciting! After building out all…
My Watermarking Journey
I am SOOO EXCITED to finally have a pet-project completed! Earlier this year, I created a watermarking app that I’ve been using on my phone so I could quick turn phone pictures for social, applying my watermark to those photos in a simple app. After some small changes, I was using this with great success and ease through the season. But one issue remained for me, and that was having this for my computers. My PC workflow all consisted of one-by-one exports in Premiere, where I had a motion graphics locator and a separate PNG file placed in a timeline…
My Lightning Shots of the YEAR!!!!
9 miles round trip was all it took to secure my best lightning photos of 2026! And the one above EASILY the best of the bunch, maybe the best I’ve shot in the last couple years! Holy cow, what an evening! I posted all the shots on my chase log; go check them out!
New Sections Are Now Live!
As mentioned earlier this week, I did some backend work on the site and have launched the Tropical Weather and Celestial Event sections! The content of the logs is not populated yet, but I have finally got the landing pages for those sections coded out and posted. Wildfires and Winter will be coming up the pipe in the coming days, which should round out all the remaining sections. Obviously populating a lot of these will be the biggest project, but now those logs have places to live. Excited to finally expand the site with these new sections! Looking forward to…
A Quiet Stretch FINALLY
There are 19 days between August 12 and August 30, and I chased 11 of them. Three were road travel days, and I flew to Houston on the 30th… 15 of 19 days I was on the road/in the sky… if you factor Edouard and flying home yesterday, that would be 17 of the last 21 days… that’s a lot… So yes, forgive me when I say FINALLY in terms of a quiet stretch… I hadn’t really had any idea I had gone that hard in the last few weeks until I felt it yesterday. Edouard wasn’t the most exhausting…
DURING THIS WEEK IN LAUBACH HISTORY
May 29, 2004 - Southern Kansas - 15 Tornadoes For nearly 20 years, this was my number 1 chase! Over a dozen tornadoes across southern Kansas, including the Conway Springs sequence which included my first ever nationally televised tornado video!
June 21, 2023 - Northeast Colorado - 19 Tornadoes The tornado chase of my lifetime, hands-down the all-time number 1! One of the most beautiful tornadoes ever photographed, one of nearly THREE dozen to touch down on this historic Colorado day.
May 24, 2016 - Southwest Kansas - 12 Tornadoes An incredible, Top 5 all-time tornado intercept chase that included dozens of tornadoes around the Dodge City area in southwest Kansas. Also included my 300th career tornado.
The Move-In Day Tornado
HAIL CHASES
FLOOD CHASES
LIGHTNING CHASES
The first chase, the first tornado, the May 14, 1997 Ohio-chase that started it all.
The number of Washington Redskins great, Art Monk, becomes a storm chasing icon.
In 22 years, 2 months, and 2 days, I drove half-a-million mile chasing storms across the country.
