My Chicago Garden

I’m heading out storm chasing today with Paul Sirvatka (meteorology department of CoD) and David Mayhew (professional photographer) .  Paul is having a heck of a time deciding where to go while David is pushing him to send us further west.  I’m just along for the ride and bring my geek toys.  We should be out until late Thursday night.  Paul is all jazzed about Thursday, but he changes his mind every 20 minutes.  Pretty funny to watch.

If you want to track us you can head over to the Spotter Network and look at the National Activity map and search for a little green car labeled "David Mayhew" or "KI4BUM" (my ham callsign). If we see anything good I’m going to try and fire up the live streaming camera for the first time.

Update @11:30PM

Two confirmed tornados and one maybe!

My first time in over a year I’ve been out on a real "chase".  Everything goes to Paul at CoD…I wouldn’t have gone that far by myself

First tornado only Paul saw..and it was more of a "dust whirl" than a tornado he says.  The second was obviously a tornado. But I was too busy looking at data and submitting the report that the only chance I had to snap a picture was when we were repositioning.  Dave/Paul got much better ones.  Dave’s pictures are here

Third one I never got a picture of as I switched to video since Dave and Paul were on their expensive cameras ;)….I think I got it but haven’t had time to check.  I was running data (of course) with my head down in the screen but happened to look up and scan behind the car (as I was trained by CoD) and yell’d "TORNADO" and everybody turned around and started snapping. Of course I’m throwing Spotter Network reports in while everybody else is shooting pictures ;)  That’s okay…that’s what I’m good at.

Also got a call from Omaha NWS (via Spotter Network) asking for ground truth.  Yeah! It works!