Another “non-chase” but this afternoon was noteworthy in that these convective showers were popping up all over the area. This is one of them approaching from the northwest. I saw some more impressive tops south of here but didn’t get any photos of t…

This morning’s cold frontal passage may have been more spectacular if it had been delayed 6 hours or so but it was still neat to see a spring-like air mass change in the middle of winter. Here are a couple of photos I snapped from the front stoop.The …

It’s never too early to start plugging this event, even if there is snow and ice on the ground!

I’m still plowing through my previous storm chase accounts in the process of consolidating all of them into a new book for the period 2002-2011. I’m currently moving slowly through 2009 as I’ve had to basically write the narrative from scratch. The 2…

This is always a fun time of year to guess what the upcoming chase season will bring. The La Nina pattern ushered in an early severe season last year with the April tornado outbreaks across the Southeast, so what will this year look like?The best curr…

Culpeper county wall cloud Sept 27th 2002Over the past few weeks I have been steadily working on a compilation of 10 years worth (2002-2011) of Virginia storm chase accounts. To date I have made it through 2005 with an initial cut at a new format and…

Okay, so it was actually the first day of astronomical winter…but this graphic showing storm reports from yesterday is still impressive for this time of year. The overall atmospheric pattern hasn’t opened up the polar express to the southeastern U.S…

One of this winter’s projects is to merge all my existing accounts of Virginia storm chasing (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and Vol. 3) with a writeup covering the past two seasons to create one volume that spans Virginia storm chasing for the ten year period 2002…

I just finished updating the statistics for Virginia stormchasing for the period 2002-2011 and have come up with the following totals for these 10 years:# Chases: 233# Hail events: 15# Wall clouds observed: 73# Funnels observed: 27# Tornadoes obser…

And so I’ve declared it. After a few near misses during November’s warmth I have declared this chase season to be over. It’s time to tally up what I’ve seen this year and to possibly pen another book to cover the 2010 and 2011 seasons.Here are two pi…