Tony's Blogbach, Between the Isobars

Thanks to Ed for taking the wheel early this grey Saturday morning… we’ve wrapped up a busy three days of chasing and have just left Peoria, Illinois to begin our long haul back home to Colorado.  It was a pretty packed slate of storms for us, although nothing terribly big, despite some high-ceiling setups.  I’ll have those inked out in the coming days, so be sure to check out the chase logs for those.  While we did see a couple birdfart tornadoes on Thursday in Iowa, I think Friday was actually my favorite of the three chase days as the storm we documented made for an early candidate for Storm Structure of the Year for me.

A couple notes on the Iowa tornadoes on Thursday.  With the two seen, I have now seen at least one tornado in Iowa each of the last 6 years dating back to 2021.  This was once a state I could never see a tornado in despite my best attempts.  I had seen two even lesser tornadoes prior to 2021 in my entire career, and since 2021, it’s arguably one of my best states now.  Neither tornado was ‘wall-worthy’, but they were among the best that day had to offer.  Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska have seen 7-year streaks in the mid 2010s, and Colorado sits at five years going into this year, so both Iowa and Colorado have been among my better chasing states since my return to Colorado in 2021.  Kansas holds my all-time state streak with 10 years straight from 2007-2016.  Kansas has been a tough cookie in recent years, certainly dropping out of the top state, while still sitting easily in first place overall with number of tornadoes seen (143; Colorado in distant second at 81).

The Riverside tornado in Iowa on Thursday I aired live on AccuWeather, meaning I have aired at least one tornado live each year I’ve been out with them since 2021, my entire stint with the company.  My first live tornado was the Virgil, Illinois tornado in August of 2021, just a few months after I started.  In total, I’ve aired 22 tornadoes live on the network since 2021, including some high-profile events such as Akron 2023, Yuma 2023, Defiance/Harlan 2024, among others.

I’ll be closing in on about 9,000 chasing miles when I pull into my driveway at home, likely tomorrow.  It’ll get in the top earliest high-mileage seasons I’ve had, although I’ll have to dig a bit deeper to figure out exactly where that falls.  Honestly, it may be middle-of-the-road; but first week in April to be approaching that mark is pretty good for me.  This thanks to what I believe is now three round-trips to the Midwest since February.  Certainly has been an active start.  I should get a breather at least through mid-week, and we’ll see what the next system has to offer up.

I’d say the vehicle setup is about 90-95%… I need to make a few tweaks to the setup, but all-in-all, I am very happy with how things are setup.  The tablet is such a nice change from the laptop and not only saves room, but extra gadgets.  The trackball, which was always a pain, no longer needs to be velcro’d to whatever random surface.  The tablet is a no-gadget screen that runs radar, navigation, and anything else I need.  The new dash mount; awesome.  Still need to make some tweaks, but I can set it up where it holds the camera in place, but at the same time is moveable to aim it wherever I need to.  Both in-car action cams look great and work real well.  This trip didn’t offer up anything particularly Vlog-worthy, but may offer some short form opportunities.  Yesterday, despite having some excitement going into the day, I didn’t shoot much vlog stuff as I felt it, too, was going to fall short.  But the testing is proving for really nice results, both for the physical setup and some of the apps I am working on.  Will be eager to fine-tune a few things in the off time coming up.  This was the first trip that required the two-person setup, which definitely needs some cleaning up, but the extra space in this Ascent verses my previous Forester DEFINITELY is so nice.

Speaking of my ride, I am getting a cargo LED light upgrade kit installed this week.  I do a lot from the back of this vehicle, and the factory lights are damn near worthless.  The LED will allow me to actually see what’s going on back there, especially at night when I may be doing some nighttime shooting, or even setting up live shots, and not having to fumble with a flashlight or phone light will be HUGE.  I am very excited to get that in.

That’s about all I got for this entry… we’re about to roll into the Quad Cities, and will venture over to the World’s Largest Truck Stop there on I-80 in Walcott, Iowa.  That’ll be our fuel stop.  Illinois has a much higher rod tax on fuel which has the prices around $1 or more per gallon that what we find here in Iowa, so fortunately I only had to pour a quarter tank of Illinois-priced fuel in during yesterday’s chase, so yay for that.  Ed has never been, so we’ll cross that off his bucketlist today as we aim for about 2/3 of the way home today, probably stopping somewhere between Grand Island and North Platte.  Goal is for both of us to be home in time for Easter dinner tomorrow.

See ya soon!

As my cute, new little widget over there on the right shows, I’ve got several chase days lined up starting tomorrow.  Spent most of the afternoon yesterday getting the ride ready to rock.  She’s been dormant since returning from Illinois, so almost two weeks.  Actually managed to keep the driving limited to a single full tank of gas during that stretch, nice cause the 87 octane here is the mid-grade, so it’s $4+ right now here in northern Colorado without fuel points chipping away at some of that.  Fortunately the 87 octane becomes regular unleaded across the border, so that’ll somewhat alleviate that wallet thief.  It’s like 2022 all over again…

So quick and dirty as I have some honey-dos to knock out before I venture out.  Likely going to take the northern route via I-70 out to Kansas today; I’m leaning toward a play on Wednesday across western Oklahoma into southern Kansas, and the original out-of-the-box idea was to hit up Amarillo tonight, but I think I-70 works.  There’s also chatter, albeit limited compared to previous events, about potential northern lights, which would be much more attainable along I-70 as opposed to I-40, so we’ll keep that option open should that evolve tonight.  I haven’t looked at a cloud forecast, so who knows, but it’s pretty low on the go-get-‘er scale at this point.

WEDNESDAY: As I mentioned, likely western Oklahoma into southern Kansas.  I think there’s a very high ceiling to this event, but still pretty conditional for tornadic supercells.  Should have no issues getting on storms, so likely something to play with, but we’ll see how the tornado chances evolve.

THURSDAY: Northeast from Wednesday, probably looking east of Des Moines, maaaybbbeee as far as into Illinois?  I dunno; another high ceiling, messy setup, but honestly between the three days, COULD be the better of the three?  It’ll be a haul to get over there, so we’ll see where things end up tomorrow night, but that’s the going plan.

FRIDAY: Largely undecided at this point exactly how far south and west we’ll venture from end-of-day Thursday, so I don’t have a Hard Target (great movie, BTW) picked out for Friday yet, but plenty of time to make that adjustment.

SATURDAY: It’s a maybe… if a solid tornado threat lines up near Ohio and we’re within shooting distance, I’ll see if its worth taking the shot.  Right now, I’d say we’re at a soft 30% for that.

Should be able to get back home to Colorado by Monday, and likely get a couple day reset ahead of the next system that may come into play later next week.  But that’s so far in lala land that I am not even going to attempt to make sense of that crystal ball reading yet.  It’s April, it’s prime time now, so don’t expect a nothing burger out of the month.

That all said, I am going to finish my home obligations, then finish loading up and head down to grab Ed in Denver; we’ll pull the trigger on our routing out and off we’ll go.  A fun note, Ed and I first chased together back in 2007, so this marks 20 seasons of our shenanigans.  So that’s pretty cool 🙂  This will be the first time in 2026 we’ll get out together.

Remember this?  Nah, probably not… this was a feature in my older sites where I would change the icon site-wide to reflect my chase potential, which was often updated on a per-day basis… well, if you look over to the right side of the screen, you notice there’s a 10-Day chase outlook.  Inspired by the old one-icon look, I created a much more modern version that shows my next 10 days chasing potential.  I’ve been stewing over such an idea for a while, but didn’t want to simply write a code to switch an icon, and this was the version I came up with.  Right now, 10 days may be shrunk to a week, or even five days pending my thoughts as I use it, but it was coded to auto update each day, so it would slide up the outlooks to the current day and fill in the final day with a default, meaning I don’t have to update all ten days every single day, and when it’s quiet, I can just leave it alone.  So that’s a fun process.  We’ll see if it sticks, but right now, I am going to test drive it seeing as I have an active stretch coming this week.  More on that in another entry 🙂

YAY!  Success!  Not sure what the turn-around time would’ve been for a straight-up repair, but my work-around to just return the original purchase back to B&H paid off; certainly faster than the alternate, which would’ve seen me send the camera back on MONDAY, and likely still would be in transit back to Nikon, so the fact that I have the new body in hand today (Thursday), and it is NOT part of the recall, means that I absolutely made the right call.  I feel a bit bad, cause most photogs would agree, B&H is one of the best places to buy camera gear, and this certainly was NOT their fault, but in the end, it saved me weeks of NOT having this camera, which likely meant this initial stint that may begin as early as next week would’ve been done without my new upgrade.  But B&H was awesome, as always, and thus I can quickly put this behind me well ahead of where I would’ve been had I gone the Nikon recall route.  Just happy my idea worked, and I can quickly put that issue to bed!

Welp, the YouTube launch happens on Friday!  At 6:30pm, the first NEW video of the NEW rebrand premieres!  It’ll be the first time ever online I have detailed out my first chase and first tornado all the way back in 1997.  It was the chase/tornado that started this whole thing I’ve been doing for the last 30 seasons.  I poured a lot of time and ‘research’ into this; and by research, I mean digging through old tubs and boxes to find everything I still had in existence from that era.  That includes an old high school “time capsule” video I took, literally ONE WEEK before the tornado chase.  That’s so cool to me that video was shot when it was cause it just gives the video such an era.  The photos, including some from waaay back, plus some cover video I had to do, including radar and a very nifty TWC call-back to the late 90s.  I’m very proud of it, and it’s a perfect way to launch to the channel.  Meanwhile, I am going to go live on Facebook about 30 minutes prior to the launch to chat and generate a little buzz.  I am not expecting a big turn out, probably my mom and my aunt honestly haha I don’t have a huge captive audience, but you never know.  I don’t really care, I am just excited to have this going.  Even have a couple other VLOGs and chase stories in the can, ready for the every-other-Friday upload schedule.  The Fridays between are reserved for low-lift, more short-form type stuff; one of those things being called Storm Chase minis where I talk about an event that doesn’t deserve or need a full chase log, but may have happened on a chase that’s pretty cool.  Other ideas are behind-the-scenes type stuff, coverage of a certain event, maybe talking about non-storm-chase stuff like blizzards or hurricanes, etc.  Easy lifts, basically, that don’t require hours of investment to create.  I mean, hell, I got 30 seasons worth of stuff, plenty to keep the channel on at least a once a week schedule.

But that all said, if you have stumbled your way in here prior to Friday the 27th and you don’t have anything better to do Friday evening, drop in, say hi, and waste about 13 minutes of your life listening to me talk about my origin.  Yes, this is my origin story haha