Tony's Blogbach, Between the Isobars

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 slight they had for two days going in, only to put it back on the following update, but alas, it is what it is.

I will venture out tomorrow to cut some miles across Nebraska, staying somewhere between North Platte and Grand Island, making for a relatively easy target drive on Monday. Most models initiate storms in Nebraska, then slide them across the river into Iowa in the early evening.  The good news is the target area would allow for a couple opportunities to pursue storms across the river into Iowa without having to go terribly out of the way.

First look at the HRRR showing the 47hr (6pm CDT Monday) forecast for Monday offering solid backing of the slight risk from SPC.

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 the new landing pages for the various post types, I decided it was time to get the Front Page more in line with that visual look.  I have fallen heavily on cards and pills for layouts, and the Front Page was pretty basic, and didn’t have any of that.  After yesterday’s slog, I have changed that.  The layout as a whole hasn’t changed much, but the new coat of paint brings it in line with the rest of the site.  Cleaner text allowed for better sizing, a cleaner display, and less empty space.  I also added the four new post types; winter weather, tropical weather, celestial events, and wildfire coverage.  I have some tweaking to do with the Front Page dynamics of those, as well as include the early weather logs, another section I created on a whim to account for pre-chase events, or before I started keeping formal logs of things, mostly winter, lightning, and stuff like that.  But it would also home the first chase as well as some Circleville-era events that I have some pictures of.

One neat little addition I added last night was a ‘During this Week in Laubach History’, a section on the main page that displays logs of all types that occurred within a week of today (the loading day), so looking out 7 days and displaying three random logs.  I am working on a full page that would include a full listing of all logs, not just three, which will be particularly cool when we get into the busier chasing season starting in about March.  This was inspired by a backend widget I created that showed me upcoming anniversaries so I could be alerted to social media post potential, particularly for lesser-profile events.  That among a few other additions are being created, and that should pave the way for a content landslide.  There are a lot of old chase logs in drafts from previous versions of the site, so it’s a matter of updating the imagery for those, and of course, getting a workout of my new watermarking program (I am so in love with that).

So yes, exciting stuff happening!  Also have a potential chase lined up Monday, more on that later as I have some things to take care of on my end.  But looking more likely that will get me out the door this weekend!

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 over a series of images that I would have to manually change the locator every time if the location changed.  It was time consuming, and limited to the HD resolution as I would have to create separate timelines for different sizes (i.e. Nikon’s standard 3:2).  I went along with it all season because I hadn’t had a chance to really write out the PC program script.

Well, I finally made some time, creating a PC program from scratch with a handful of features I couldn’t really have or need in the mobile app.  After some trial and error (and the fantastic test from Sunday’s lightning), I was finally able to hone in a finished first version with a handful of really handy features that make watermarking images SO much quicker and do so WITHOUT Premiere, which was the main goal.  Once that was locked in, I went back to the mobile app, and revised it to include many of the PC features, stripped out excess stuff I won’t need for mobile (i.e. multiple output sizes, the social text, etc), and added geo-tagging from the photos to auto-populate location and date, which was a major feature I wanted to add to the original.  In addition, I added some basic editing/cropping to the mobile app, including rotation and zoom controls, plus the additional output which keeps the photo at its original dimensions as opposed to the single dimension output.  A recent addition to the original app which carried over was the ability to create a transparent PNG with a watermark locator I can import into my mobile video editing software that’ll let me watermark entire video sequences.

The added perk to all this is now everything looks to the same.  There were subtle, but noticeable differences in the font, text, and highlights between the Premiere watermarking/locators verses the mobile app.  Now, I have the same layout, margins, and font/effects between both, so it should be nearly impossible to see any differences between PC outputs and phone outputs.  I also removed the line separator in the locator, which I went back and forth on, but I could not get the code to work with the line on PC, so I just went ahead and dumped it.  It’s a very small tweak, but again, everything now looks the same between devices.  This is also nice because for images I use here on my website, I used the ‘Premiere’ watermark method, meaning I would have to redo anything I did on my phone.  Now, because everything looks the same between the two, I can directly upload the mobile versions and not have to redo them on the PC since they all look the same, eliminating a good chunk of work having to do everything on the PC.

Right now, I have no intention to change anything with my YouTube uploads which use the Premiere motion graphics template, so I’ll leave that as is seeing as that’s a whole different element, and I am perfectly fine with that option.  All this needed to do was streamline the watermarking workflow between my devices, get it all looking the same, and add some quality of life features, and I now have a fully fledged out V1 of this for both platforms!  This marks my first official programmed app and window-based program! 😀

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!

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 filling out the rest of the logs!