Back to the Full Time.

Work schedule that is...

There is nothing I want more in my life than to be able to chase freely and whenever I want to while being able to afford a comfortable living for myself. Doesn't seem like much to ask out of life but apparently it is. I have always admired people that chased their dreams as opposed to just simply conforming, and try to live by example, but it is tough. I have myself to blame for some of it.

Very few chasers know my actual life story and the burdens of my past. These burdens still haunt me in the present in the form of great debt. A debt which has made it harder to get the life I want as I struggle to rid myself of it all. That is the main reason for this decision.

I came close to achieving it back in 2009, more than half of it was wiped out and things were going swell. But then life had other plans, my van exploded and I was forced to purchase a new vehicle, then I lost my job a few months later [great timing HUH?!] Since then I took the time off to experience the chase freedom I've always wanted. I had some money saved up, and there was unemployment. Yes, I collected it for awhile and chased. Think less of me for it? Fuck you. I deserved it.

That time was short though, but in that time I realized what I truly want out of life. I was making big bucks back in the day, but was miserable at my job. Being able to chase freely is the most amazing thing in life, but struggling to pay off debt isn't. It's clear now what I have to do.

It is damn near impossible to make a decent income from chasing. Especially in my position. No money to start, living far away from the alley. I don't have a rich family supporting my passion. I've had to purchase my way in with mostly bottom of line, shitty equipment that breaks down allot. My competition is spoiled rich kids with fat allowances that can load up on the latest and greatest technology and simply smoke my ass. I have no trust funds or large sums of money coming my way to secure my life. Fair enough.

So, what does one do? You need money to chase. If you dont have people paying your way through life, you must work for money. If you work, you can't chase. When I say you can't chase, I mean "I can't chase as much as I want to." Some people work because they want big paychecks to buy a big house a big boat, have 7 cars and a bunch of ridiculous stuff to which they can use to validate their own perspective on what it means to be successful.

Not me, I will work to support what I love doing. Even if it means living in a small trailer or apartment on a 25K a year income. If I can chase, my life is complete. So that is where I stand today. I've taken a job with  Deck Staining company working full time. The pay isn't as great as I was hoping initially, but it will be enough to get me back on track, to hopefully wipe out my truck payments along with credit debt.

In a year they tell me I can be my own boss, with my own schedule and can chase whenever I want along with a good income to boot and that is the reason they hired me. They want me in that position, not doing the labor/field work I am going to be doing this year, but its something I have to do while I learn the business.

Plus, I may be gloom and dooming my situation more than I need to. The guy who hired me is understanding of what I want to do, and told me if there is a system I can't miss and want to chase they will work with me. It seems like a good fit. They understand my passion, and seem to be a company based on "you get my back, I got yours" and I like that. I've turned down better paying jobs when they've told me "yea, you get 1 to 2 weeks off a year thats it, chasing won't work and you have to make a choice"

Well I've made my choice...I will never give up the dream. I will make it work, and while my 2012 season may have taken a hit. I refuse to let my life and my dream suffer the same fate. I don't care what work I have to do to make this happen. It will happen. Work is just that...work. Not life.

Calling You Out

Anyone in the weather community knows what happened in Henryville. We all know the internet is, well...the internet. I am all for people expressing their feelings but when they go out of their way and try too hard to be controversial and then don't have the balls to allow for people to respond to it. Well, that is what makes a person a sad sorry lowlife.

So to the person who made this video:

How about enabling comments or linking us to your website/facebook/blog or whatever you have.

You are a pussy, and a sad excuse for a human being. Man up and show yourself mr big wannabe internet shocker badass. I think its karma who is going to find YOU one day. Loser.

Here We Gooooo!!!

Looks like the severe weather chasing season of 2012 is about to really kick off with a couple active systems of interest. One being this Tuesday with potential severe weather along the KS/NE border and another area in the southern MS river valley. Afterwards the EURO along with the GFS are showing an even more potent system around March 2nd.

As much as I would love to chase both systems I will probably sit out the first, and wait to see what the second holds. Not because I don't want to chase...but a last minute financial disaster may leave me sitting out some of these early season temptations so I can recover for better stuff later in the year. Obviously this is not my choice, but I need to be smart. Still though I am monitoring each system and if logistics can fall into place I will chase!

I kind of like the idea of blowing off some early season grunge and perhaps taking a stab at the late spring and summer setups instead. Those July and August storms, even when they don't produce tornadoes have some of the meanest, greenest, evil HP storm structure you can imagine. Give me one of those over some 20 foot LCL scuddy March grunge anyday! Plus fewer chasers venture to the N plains for the summer season, so that is a bonus. Regardless of what happens. I WILL GIT R DONE THIS YEAR!

I am almost ready to launch the new site. Its not perfect and I will need to continue tweeking it once its launched, but it will look and function pretty much how I want it to, so that is good enough. If I have to sit out the early season setups though I won't do so quietly, and will use the time to draw people into the Aerostorms world with my forecast and nowcast posts. I always got positive feedback from my ramblings on the Convective Addiction site, so I must continue to utilize my skill to my advantage. I've come too far to suddenly half ass things.

Its almost go time folks, start your engines!!

Previewing the New Site

The other day I made mention I was working with someone to help redo my site. Well here is a little preview of what he has slapped together so far.

So far so great. The site design is moving along faster than I had hoped. I just need to figure out how I want the rest of it laid out and once it gets put together and any remaining bugs worked out I can begin the daunting task of transferring all of the content from my current site over. The goal is to have this all completed by March 1st, the unofficial beginning of chase season.

This new site, as mentioned will be a more modern site that should appeal to the masses more. This, along with the new facebook page dedicated to it will hopefully help get the Aerostorms brand name out there and get it stuck in peoples' heads. I look forward to being able to quickly and easily make forecast posts and daily updates with the new template, and giving the visitors a chance to leave comments and interact on the site.

I already had such an outlet with the Convective Addiction site, but that site is a mess and noone is motivated to fix it. I wish everyone was enthused as they were when we first created it, because we really blew people out of the water our first year, and then half the members just decided they didn't really care anymore, that chasing suddenly wasn't cool or something. I've tried to keep it alive mostly by myself and with occasional help from Skip and Jesse, but if the day ever comes where it folds over I need to make sure I have my own solid thing going.

Some might be saying, why should any of this matter? Chase for yourself you attention whore etc etc etc. Well, maybe YOU want to work a 9 to 5, chase SOME of the time, and are ok with chasing being a convenience whenever other things in life allow you to do so. Not me though, chasing is what I want to be known for. Too many people are simply just born with the means to make themselves easily successful because its easy to start out when you have all the resources to simply just buy your way to the top. For people like me, who have try to make something out of nothing, you have to give 110% and build up something solid, or risk failing hard trying. My chasing isn't supported by a parents credit card, so I must build this up for myself. I have too much passion for this to simply just half ass it.

The Future of Aerostorms and this Blog

Since the launch of my personal website back in March of 2010 the site's content has grown quite a bit, but not its exposure. For starters, stupid me named it a made up word so when it comes to awesome google search-a-bility my site is pretty much a no show. Who knew trying to be creative and avoiding overly used, cheesy, plain and boring names like "__ ___ storm chaser/s" or things like "dark cloud search.com" would have a negative effect in the end. Oops.

Secondly, the internet world as we know it has been shying away from traditional looking websites in favor of a more blog oriented site. I personally have never preferred this look, but then again my entire life I always seemed to be on the other side of the fence when it comes to whats popular.

So, what does this mean? Basically, its time to convert, and for the past 2 months I have been tinkering around a new platform, since I am not very PC savvy its been a slow process. I have now enlisted the help of someone with more experience to help get things running. It is time to give aerostorms.com a facelift.

The main reason being I am tired of selling myself short, and its time I give my work the exposure it deserves. There are some pretty powerful websites out there, with far less meaty chasing content that are very successful just because they are updated in a timely manner and have good public exposure.

It is too much of a pain in the ass to update my website on the fly, and for whatever reason the site builder software isn't browser friendly and only works on an old version of firefox. Any other browser or even newer versions of firefox and things just don't work how they're supposed to.

I also like to write weather posts and graphics, there is no easy way to do this on a website without a blogroll.  With my new site I plan to update it almost daily, since doing so will be far much less effort. I don't have all the time in the world to sit and dilly dally with my site all day, so I need to start thinking about how to do things in the most efficient way possible.

That being said, once this major project is completed this blog will become less active. I will probably only reserve it for more personal thoughts relating to chasing as opposed to the types of general weather posts I sometimes make, those types of general weather posts are what I want to start featuring on my website! Its those types of posts that drive hits and keep people coming back and in turn, can help make a website more profitable. Other people have done it, and so can I.

Its time to start stepping it up, and being more competitive. I've come too far and worked too hard to sell myself short. In 2012 I really plan to, and hope to get the Aerostorms brand name out there!

First Thunderstorms of 2012

Well, here is my annual "first thunderstorms of the year" post for 2012. A little early it seems but its true.

Typically we see out first thunderstorms at the end of February, but every now and then we'll get a little bonus in January. This was one of those years. I read on WGNs blog that in 141 years of weather records there have only been 54 January days with thunderstorms. Seeing as how thats 54 out of 4371 it goes to show how unusual such an occurrence it is. It also read that January [to no surprise really] is the month with the fewest thunderstorms.

In true Chicago weather mood swing fashion, these storms came just 2 days after our biggest snowfall so far this winter. Funny to think that 2 days earlier I was streaming snowfall out my window, and then I film the storms. Of course when I turned on my camera to do so I only had 8 minutes of battery, gotta love off season laziness and un-preparedness.

The event did do a good thing though, it has reminded me that spring is closer than it seems, and its time to kick it into high gear to finish pre-season prep work. I still have much to do. Anyways radar grab and video below!

Unfortunately, these general storms were part of a much larger story which was the years first significant severe weather outbreak in parts of AR, AL, MS and TN. An EF-3 tornado struck already hard hit Birmingham, AL area killing at least 2 people. Not a good start to 2012 in that regards.

Radar:

A short youtube video as well, mostly put together because I want to test a new, more professional platform for uploading clips online.

What a Potential Blizzard Looks Like 10 days away.

This is what a future potential blizzard looks like on a forecast model 10 days away. If this plot were to verify the Chicago area would escape the worst, we would start off with mostly rain [potentially heavy] then get whats called dry slotted and then perhaps an inch or 2 of snow on the back side of this system as it moves away.

The center of the system is located over C IL, from here and points SW is where the dry slot would form [this is what gives storms those big comma shapes on radar/satellite] so we would expect a break in precip, before the snow moves in on the back side as the system moves in.

Parts of IA/MN/WI are on the "cold side" of the system the entire time and would see the heaviest snow accumulations.

Areas around the MS river and points east could potentially see severe weather in the form of a squall line that brings a wind damage/tornado threat.

BUT, 10 days might as well be an eternity when it comes to forecast model reliability. What is important to take away from this though, is that the forecast model is showing an overall colder and stormier pattern, which suggests our easy winter is about to end. So while this event shown here might not become a reality, overall, the second half of January doesn't look as pleasant as the first half. This is basically how a long range forecast is derived, by looking at trends.

2012: Here we go

Well here we are, 2012. Now I can say these are the official numbers from 2011:

Chases: 25
Tornadoes: 26
Tornado days: 11 [3-22, 4-9, 4-19, 4-27, 5-12, 5-21, 5-24, 6-19, 6-20, 7-26, 11-7]

I hit quite a few milestones this year as well:

First tornado on first chase [3-22]
First Iowa tornado
First March tornado
First July tornado
First November tornado
First back to back tornado days [6-19 and 6-20]
First chase in Alabama
First Alabama tornado
First Nebraska tornado
First EF-5 [Piedmont, El Reno 5-24]
Longest consecutive days chased: 7 [5-18 through 5-25]
Longest tornado/chase streak: 4 [6-19, 6-20, 7-26, 11-7]*

*technically this streak is still going, if I manage a tornado on the first chase in 2012 it will be 5 and counting*

2011 was a very successful chase year. While the tornado count doesn't compare to 2010, I had more tornado days in 2011. This lends me to believe I am getting better at storm positioning and field tactics. 2010s high tornado count is due to mostly 5-22 and 6-17 [with over 20 tornadoes just from those 2 days alone.] So it is a good thing to be able to say I was able to see tornadoes on more chases for sure.

2011 was not without its major fails though. I blew some pretty big days, namely 4-14 and 5-22. These days it was simple chase mistakes that happen from picking the wrong storm. It will be impossible to never have this happen in 2012, and I expect similar flops, though hopefully minimized.

With 2011 being the exceptionally violent year that it was I saw more death and destruction up close than I did any other year, while this is not something I care to repeat in 2012, nor proud that its something that happened in 2011, its still a fact whether I like it or not.

So what does 2012 bring? I touched up on this before a bit in my last blog but now that it is here its easier to gauge where I am at. 2012 is going to be a very tough year for me, especially financially. I am stretched about as far as I can go and unfortunately I think this will be a limiting factor for me in 2012, unless I team up with people more, which I don't like doing as much. No offense to anyone out there, I just prefer to chase in my own vehicle and have all the say...but I will do what I have to do.

I have a feeling I will be on less solo missions this year as a result. As for my setup, not much will change. I hope to acquire a new laptop from a friend in Denver that will allow me to better stream and upload video to media more efficiently, but if that falls though, I know my current setup will at least work. I probably won't have too many upgrades to the vehicle itself. I still hope to get a HAM cert, as well as a cert in first responding, but thats becoming more unlikely with each passing day.

The big change I will do for myself in 2012 is be more conscious of my video-taping skills. After releasing a DVD this year I realize I need to improve my videography skills some. Less multi tasking during tornado time and more focusing on getting high quality video is the main improvement I plan to focus on this year. Also at the same time, I plan to be allot more aggressive in how close I get. I've seen the limits, and with each passing year I gain more knowledge about intercepting. I wan't better, more dramatic shots that show more detail of the tornado.

I plan to raise the bar for myself in that regard, which contradicts the improved videography goals as there won't be much time for relaxed tripoded intercepts, but I will find a balance when out there in the field somehow. I have a feeling though my name will end up in the negative chaser spotlight more times than once. Often times such feats come with controversy...and thats fine. I am not afraid to take the heat.

Afterall, its my chasing career, and I will do with it as I please. I have no time to worry about what people think of me, I just need to go out there and git r done. I don't want to, nor have I ever tried to intentionally piss people off, but they are going to judge me regardless, so I might as well do what I want. Remember this name, it will be relevant in 2012!

Basically, I just want to keep improving my chasing in every way I can. There is always room to improve, grow and evolve as a chaser. 2012 will be no exception. I will address the challenges, and make sure I do everything in my power I can to make it the best chasing year yet. I know no set bounds, only my own personal limits.

More updates as they come! Its been an easy winter here. Mild and dry. Even though its January we have less than 2 inches of snow to date this winter, and our coldest temp has been a balmy 18 degrees or something like that. Ill take it!

Spring gets closer with each passing day, I am anxious, and ready!

Decentber: About My Hate for Snow

A pretty mild, calm and boring December it has been so far, hence I am calling it Decentber. Because the weather hasn't been bad at all. Most days have been above normal, with sun, and what little precip has fallen has been rain. I could definitely live with it staying like this the entire winter.

Many are shocked that a weather nut such as myself loathes snow. Somewhere between the time when I was a kid and snow meant a potential day off school to the time I became an adult and it meant a pain in the ass commute to work it is true, I lost my love for the stuff. It is annoying and an inconvenience.

Now don't get me wrong, if we get another blizzard like we had back in February that would certainly be awesome. That was a full on severe weather assault with 60mph winds, hail and thundersnow totalling over 20 inches that put the city to a hault. THAT I WILL TAKE. But you can save all your piddly 2-12 inch accumulations for somewhere else in the country.

The media chaser would say "but snow video sells good," Yea, maybe in Texas where an inch of snow equals the apocalypse, but here in Chicago we have plenty of media to go out and shoot their own B-roll shots of idiot drivers sliding into ditches. Believe me, I have tried. So that argument is moot.

Sure, snowstorms are a challenge to forecast and are a good way to rack ones meteorological brain and put their forecast skills to the test, but again, I can do that with a snow event somewhere else. Doesn't need to be in my backyard.

Snow makes for pretty pictures: Yea, not in the city, it turns brown and black after about 2hrs. I am not a photog and driving 2hrs to take pictures of snow is not appealing to me.

So I just don't get excited over the stuff, and wouldn't complain if Decentber continued all the way into March. Winter is basically a go big or go home type deal for me. Snowpocalypse that brings the human race crawling to its knees, or nothing at all. Because unless it is just that, it is nothing more than an inconvenience. Snow loses its magic at the age of 16, when suddenly one must drive in it, and places of employment [unlike schools] remain open.

Plus, the weather statistic nerd in me has realized that if we continue on this pace, we will set a new record for the latest date of measurable snow in the city, and who knows what else. Always neat to experience either end of the record spectrum.

Things I am Going to be Working on.

Before I get to the point I should mention I had an incredible chase about 2 weeks ago in Oklahoma. At east 8 tornadoes, some very beautiful and high contrast, were documented by myself along with Ben Holcomb and Jonathan Williamson. Detailed log can be seen here: http://www.aerostorms.com/110711-Oklahoma-Tornadoes-in-November.php

The sad part is that only covers about half of what went on. A little known fact about that day is we actually got hit by a brief spinup while blasting north under a new developing area of rotation. My ears popped, debris flew by from the west, and then whipped back around from the east. No doubt in my mind it was a brief tornadic spinup. At that point the battery in my camera was dead from filming over 90 minutes of the chase so I have no video. Jon had his camera on the seat since he was focusing on still pictures, I was filming with Bens camera and had it pointed out the windshield, but he said the video turned out like crap. So who knows...

That being said, one of the things I will be upgrading is a new extended battery. Never again do I want to have a battery die during the middle of a hot chase. That was the first, and will be the last time that ever happens.

I also plan to get a wind filter, one thing I can't stand in video is excessive amounts of wind noise. Sort of hard to avoid in this line of work, but a filter is a relatively cheap purchase so its worth a shot.

New laptop is coming thanks to a very generous individual. It won't be top of the line [nothing I own ever is] but it will be better than what I have, and I've been able to make do with what I have, so an upgrade is an upgrade. I am tired of being skunked in video sales [especially by people with worse shots] because it takes my old ass laptop 2hrs to render out a 20 second video clip to upload.

I say this every year, but I would really like to finally get my HAM license. Not sure Ill have money for a radio though, so we'll see. 

I also want to get certified in first responding. Arriving on the devastation moments after it happened during the April 27th and May 24th outbreaks really was a kick in the gut. The things I saw those days were just...ugh. I need to be able to help more.

So that is a bit of a preview of the things I plan to change for 2012. 

If I have time I may attempt to build the rest of the hail guards for the windshield and rear window. Time is short, and so are funds. So we'll see!

Any moment we will be in winters grip, and as always there is plenty to keep me busy during the off season. 2012 potentially has some major opportunities for me. Lots of leads for good things, just gotta keep my head in the game and make sure I am always striving to improve!