Saturday, September 23, 2006
I just won an auction on eBay for what I am going to use as my dash cam. I won a Sony Handycam TRV68 for $130. I wanted to have a camera I could leave on my cruise-cam mount during an entire chase. Jon V opened this idea to me after our recent venture into Minnesota. I elected NOT to use my other digital camera because I wanted the 2 hour record time. Quality isn't such an issue with a dash cam. I'll use this when we get into a chase and leave it running the entire time up til the chase ends (or the tape runs out). I've learned on a couple of occasions how nice it would've been to have a running camera with lightning strikes and other things. Not to mention the in-vehicle chatter which could make for a good sound byte later. I'll probably purchase an extended battery later so I can cover a couple days on a single charge. Also with this purchase, I picked up 20 8mm blank videos (new, not used like that ass I bought from on eBay over the Spring). I'll be getting organized over the winter after I think over this passed year with any changes I'd like to make. Beyond that, hunkering down for the off-season as upwards of three feet of snow fell in the mountains over the weekend. A good sign that chasing will soon be non-existant. I figure to get at least one more chase in come October, so there's a chance I could eclipse the 20,000 mile mark for this season.
Another note; our brief tornado in South Dakota last weekend marked my 50th tornado observed counting my pre-stat-collecting tornadoes on May 14, 1997 (Clarksburg, OH) and October 22, 2000 (OKC, Crossroads Mall). With that in mind, I changed up my tornado photo page on the new site with a list of all the tornadoes I have seen including a thumbnail (if available), date and location of that tornado.
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Wednesday, September 20, 2006
I have completed the 2002, 2003, and 2004 chase log overhauls leaving me with 45 more logs to do. All of those fall in 2005 and 2006 when I had a digital camera and was snap-happy. I've eliminated a couple logs which didn't have much to them, but have the bulk of my log overhaul upcoming.
With time not an issue, I'm likely going to go log-by-log and do one at a time as I may. At some point, they'll be completed. I won't be done there as I have other sections to complete, but most of those will be minor. I will begin work on those when I've converted all my images over to the watermarked versions. Those will also be done on a log-by-log basis.
I'm very happy with the new look thus far. When I finished my chase logs from my two big outbreak days in 2004 (May 12 and May 29), I enjoyed the new feel. That and I took some time to make some updates to the logs themselves, including more detailed locations where I could and a time stamp or two. I also took those logs and put them all nicely on one page as opposed to the multiple pages those logs took on. They're much cleaner and work very well, I think.
I was tempted to uploaded my Sept. 16 chasing log in the new format to my website to give a sneak peak of what I was doing. Since I missed most of the best action, the log was more of a scenic photo album than anything else, thus am in no hurry to fire it up. I've posted most of those pics in other areas of the web, so they are at least being seen by a few people.
Nothing else really to speak of. Temps this weekend as suppose to get very nippy. We may even see the first flakes of the season overnight Friday into Saturday here in the Metro area. Definately nothing to concern yourself over, but a good sign that the change of seasons is upon us. Fall begins here at 10:03pm I do believe on Friday night. So glad to be done with the 90s and 100s!
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Monday, September 18, 2006
This was a tough day of chasing after seeing what friends bagged less than hour ahead of us. I'm not sure there was anything our group could've done other than leave an hour earlier to get up in time to see these storms. We missed the first tornado by less than an hour and barely made it across I-90 in South Dakota in time to catch the dying second tornado after it destroyed a farm house. Unfortunately whatever condition that was in place before we got there disappeared quickly after our arrival (our absence, perhaps), so there were no more tornado reports after that til well after dark. It was a fun and epic chase as we ended up as far as Pipestone, Minnesota before turning around and giving our forth storm of the day a final chance before sunrise. We ended the night in Sioux City, IA over a Chili's dinner and celebrating a good day. Verne Carlson and company had the shots of the day as they were within a couple hundred feet of the first tornado. After a quick night's sleep, we made the long journey back to Colorado where we arrived home over 1,600 miles later.
Approaching the remnants of the tornado which destroyed the farm house just west of I-29 in Eastern, SD.
This makes the third tornado for me in 2006 and puts me at 18,820 miles for the season up to this point. I'll post a full report here soon after I decide whether or not to make it twice with the new website format.
Meanwhile, check out Verne Carlson's report. Its amazing!
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Saturday, September 16, 2006
Blasting north on I29 to a tornado warned cell near Salem, SD. We are currently at mile marker 22 and should be in Sioux Falls in 45 mins.
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Passing thru Lexington. Approaching the dryline to Guns n Roses.
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Just filled up in Ogallala, NE. Now at Paxton. ETA to Omaha 300pm.
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Wow! That's all I could say when I saw the tornado progs! If you were hesitant about today before that came out, you're definately eyeing it now if you can make it in half a day. Omaha, our initial target, sits 519 miles from Brighton which will put us at about 7 hours. My fantasy is to be in Omaha before 3pm CDT, which with a 6am MDT departure, should be no problem accounting for a gas stop in between. Verne and Michael stayed out after chasing today, so we'll probably meet up with them at some point tomorrow. They're off I-29 near Blair, Nebraska, so my advice to them is to sit tight. We'll come to them.
Very excited to see some hope for tomorrow in what was looking to be an iffy day. Boundries oughta play an interesting role tomorrow for us, and I think as long as we get far enough east in time, we should be good. The plan of attack, get as far east as possible, then go north. We should do fine.
I'll update when I can tomorrow as I am going to set a 5am wake-up call and get on the road as soon as I can after that. I've got most of my gear set to go. Very stoked right now. By the way, this is my very FIRST September chase ever! Lets ring it up right!
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Friday, September 15, 2006
Doing some nowcasting for Verne as he should have just crossed into Nebraska on the southern storm which has just crossed the state line. The storms near Holdrege look very impressive at this time with velocity scans showing a nice couplet to compliment the reflectivity hook. Hail up to 2 inches being reported near Holdrege from that storm. Anxious to hear Verne's report from today.
Chasing tomorrow looks to be a go. The gang has been coordinated with and we're looking at a departure of 6am from Brighton. We'll shoot out I-80 as planned and make our adjustments on the road. I'm still leaning at Southeastern Nebraska at this time as I think we'll have better chances ahead of the dryline before the front plows through. We'll see how things look tonight and most certainly in the morning.
I head off campus in 30 minutes to begin my closing shift at the pizza joint. I'll be able to pull the text products from SPC on my cell phone before I get home, which should allow me to get home and go straight to bed before my 5:15am wake-up call.
Updates will be sparce through tomorrow except a text message sent to my blog, so stay tuned as I'll update as frequently as I can. Very excited to get out again and look forward to whatever comes up! Should be stormy to say the least!
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Plans are in their final stages for tomorrow's marathon chase. As of now, I have Jon V, Allison, and Tom coming along with me. I've talked to everyone and we're all a go as of now.
There are two areas to watch for tomorrow. The first is the better of the two up north. The second is along a dryline which is forecasted to setup from north to south in Eastern Nebraska, Eastern Kansas, and southward into Oklahoma.
The northern target is my initial play. With a departure out of Brighton at 6:00am, we could feasbly make Sioux City, IA by 3pm CDT. If storms haven't fired yet, we could find ourselves in decent position. Better dynamics and shear rest up there. The front is in the vicinity, and will need to remain behind us, otherwise we'll be sitting in a fast moving squall line with little hope. This area is also closer to the low which will keep surface winds coming out of a favorable direction. The WRF at 0z Sun has 80 and 90kts of winds screaming out of the SW over Central Nebraska into NW Iowa and Southern Minnesota. Better difluence is just south of this over Eastern Nebraska, Southern Iowa, and Northeast Kansas. The 250mb jet max is centered over Northern Nebraska and Southeast South Dakota, so the area of concern sits in the right entrance quad of this jet. Closer to the surface, the WRF is hinting at TDs near 70 which I think is way overdone. Currently, TDs are in the 50s with 60s over Southern Kansas and points south. I'm not sure all of that will advect into our target area by tomorrow afternoon. I think mid 60s would be a reach, but definately a safer bet than lower 70s.
On the other hand, the GFS continues to slow this system down. The previous runs had the 500mb low sitting over Central North Dakota at 0z Sunday. The latest runs have it backed even further west in extreme Western North Dakota. This obviously pulls our target area back to the west and closer to home for us. The bulk of the precip being shown on the GFS is sitting in extreme southeastern South Dakota and extreme northeastern Nebraska. However, CAPE values look much better in Southern Nebraska as opposed to the northern areas as the GFS is progging nearly 2500J/kg along the KS/NE border and only 1500J/kg in SE South Dakota.
This is a tough call... you know there's going to be a squall line along the front, which is why areas in Southern Nebraska and Northern Kansas are being eyeballed; while the dynamics are a bit weaker there, the chances for storm isolation look much better, and of course with that, tornado chances also improve a bit. Storm motions are also a concern as models have them progged as high as 40kts. The biggest concern is the time frame heading out; can we be where we need to be in time? We can spend all night running around as we have most of Sunday to get home, but if we're going to drive all day Saturday to fall short, that'll all but kill any reason to go out.
I must admit to liking the GFS's slowing of the system. Even if there's a northly trek in our journey tomorrow, areas west trim off valueable time for us.
With all that said, our plans are to be on the road from Brighton tomorrow morning at 6am and we'll just haul out I-80 towards the Lincoln/Omaha area and make a quick evaluation from there to determine what warrents the next move. The upside to a setup like this is that there will be storms to play in, regardless whether they're lined together or isolated. Add to that cheaper gas prices being split four ways makes for a reasonably cheap trip. I'll probably post a quick update before I leave campus later this afternoon.
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Thursday, September 14, 2006
I got the green light from my second job to take off Saturdya night in the case I do go chasing this weekend. Right now, I'd say its sitting about 80%. There's more than enough uncertainty with the way the models are playing all this out to make you wonder if it'll snow in Kansas while tornadoes are on the ground. The time off won't come free as I agreed to save my manager from an open to close by closing up shop Friday night. That occurs at midnight which will get me home around 1am. I'll sleep fast and be up no later than 5am to prepare the van and meet up with my chasing partners, whom I'll be bribing for some drive time while I try and squeeze a dream or two out from the road. It'll undoubtly be the last chase trip of the year for me, and will end as crazy as the season began in terms of marathons. I should eclipse 18,000 miles for the season upon our return.
I'll do a lengthy analysis in the morning and will probably post again midday with the final word and plans. I'm very excited about getting out. One last chance to see friends and get in a bit of road time. Hopefully we can salavage something out of 2000-sux.
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Wednesday, September 13, 2006
A much needed update with the weekend looking to be interesting...
Models began showing signs of a beautiful system with a classic divergent pattern back on Monday and I've been sititng on it since. With each passing day, the models have kicked this system out a bit further north and east. The ETA which pulled this system in for the first time in recent runs, has it way up in Minn while the GFS has the area of concern over Northeast Kansas and Southeast Nebraska.
I've set plans in motion to clear my Saturday with an anticipated early departure before sunrise Saturday morning. Assuming all the details fall into place, I'll be pulling a monster work day Friday starting at 6:30am and going through almost 1am. With a few hours of sleep, I'll hit the road with nearly appointed Colorado Spotter Jon Van de Grift, his girlfriend, Allison, and Tom Dulong. So yes, White Lightning is filled for this trip already. The trigger has yet to be pulled, and I imagine with the models now starting to diverge as much as the 500mb charts on this thing, it'll probably be a Friday afternoon decision. I should find out my working fate tomorrow which will make or break the chasing decision. I get locked into my work arrangements regardless, so at the worst, I get a full weekend off.
The website update continues to move right along. As of this writing, I have watermarked all my images from 2003 and earlier. I have also completed the few logs I have from 2002. The 2003 and 2004 chase seasons have a total of 16 logs to be updated, so I'll probably get both of those years knocked out within the next week. It'll be the 2005 and 2006 seasons where I got my hands on digital cameras that'll be the most time consuming.
I have to give some credit to Storm Chaser Ed Ballou who created a wonderful program called Photo Ops which watermarks and resizes images in any directory. This will greatly speed up the image conversion process. I used it for the first time on the 2003 images and it took all of several minutes and a few mouse clicks and keystrokes. I see he's planning a couple of updates, one of which will be huge for me as I am defaulting all my images at a width of 500 pixels (at 72dpi). Currently I have to use a percentage to resize my images which causes some smaller sizes on video captures as opposed to the digital photos. I am eagerly awaiting this update and will be using it frequently in the upcoming seasons. Thanks Ed for a great, FREE, program!
Some other changes to the website include this blog. Because of the pain in the butt it'll be to convert my blog, I'm probably going to be forced to start again. I'll lose a lot of good stuff in the conversion, but it won't be in vein. I will make last second attempts to make the conversation and may get lucky as the code on Blogger is pretty straight forward. If that's the case, my blog will go uninterrupted. Otherwise, expect a fresh start upon release of the new site.
The file structure of the site will change, but that's mostly behind the scenes stuff. I am organizing my chase log images into directories for that year to cut down on huge file listings within a single image directory. I will continue with my naming format (YYMMDDa), but will be placing images in the different directories. I haven't decided if I'll block off the directory listings or not. I'll ponder that as the work progresses.
With all that, this website will be short of updates. No new pages will go up, and this includes chase logs... UNLESS I get something good, there probably won't be any major changes on this site for the time being with the exception of my blog updates. There is no sense in creating a page only to be replacing it.
I have uploaded just about all my videos to YouTube. You can check those out here. Most everything pre-2005 is up and ready to view in my profile page. Those videos will be linked from various areas of the new site. All future videos will do the same.
So with that, I'll conclude this lengthy rambling... keeping my fingers crossed for this weekend in hopes that something works out for us. Otherwise, I'll just be hoping the Skins make another helping of Texas Toast against the Cowboys on Sunday! Ciao!
Me at my semester internship position! What an awesome gig to have!
KMGH - Channel 7 - Denver, CO
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Sunday, September 03, 2006
A late post before I go to bed; I've uploaded 16 videos to YouTube this evening. This is an easier task than I thought considering most of these videos were already formatted and ready to go. All I had to do was upload them to YouTube. I won't link them all as some of them aren't ready yet, but you can go to my profile and check them out..
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=laubacht
I have many more coming down the pipe, including some hail vids and a few other tornado vids... I probably will finish with this project before the end of the weekend.
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Saturday, September 02, 2006
Wanted to update the progress of the website renovation...
As of today, I have completed the basic template for all the pages in the site. I have also worked out a new template for my log pages. As of now, I am working on the main pages to determine layout for log lists, photo albums, etc.
The site is taking on a real clean look. The plain white background will make for much easier reading, I think. The drop-down menu below the banner also saves me some space and makes a lot of sub-sections a one-click navigation.
Some things I am starting to see change from the old site. I will eliminate log entries which have no pictures. This includes most uneventful busts and a lot of logs form the 2004 season in which I took mostly video and didn't capture stills. Only 9 of 26 chases that year will be linked. The log main pages will take on a completely different look which I think is much easier to surf through. They are listed on a table with every other line greyed to make the rows easier to follow. The log link is the date, the titles have been removed, and added are states traveled, mileage of the chase, what I witnessed, and spotter/chase log.
Which brings me to my next change, the spotter vs. chase log. I figured it was unfair of me to say that I chased 30 times in a season and saw tornadoes on only 5 when 8 of those chases were simply running around town chasing hail or flooding. I decided to catagorize those logs separately from the real chase logs seeing as those aren't really tornado chases seeing as either tornado chances were extremely low and we were chasing for something else, or I was documenting flooding, damage, or lightning photography. Those will be catagorized as spotter logs and left out of all my stats except overall mileage.
Here's how I defined spotter logs on the page...
Spotter logs typically are local chases in which seeing a tornado was highly unlikely, or chases that were to document flooding, storm damage, hailstorms, lightning photography, or other non-tornatic weather-related events. If a tornado was observed on a spotter chase, it will be counted as a regular chase. However, not seeing a tornado on a regular chase does not make it a spotter log. Spotter logs are counted in overall mileage, however they are not counted in tornado statistics.
The logs themselves are going through a major overhaul as well. The log title will be the date of the event with its location beneath it. The 1630z SPC outlook will also be included on all the logs. I will continue to record miles for each chase, however will eliminate the miles thus far in the season (current career miles will be included instead). Weather-related stats include storm intercepts, tornadoes, largest hail size, and any flooding observed. Two lists will appear beneath those; one which includes anyone I chased with (links to their website or chase log) and a list of any video clips from the chase.
I will find myself redoing many of my logs to incorporate this. Earlier in the year, I already dug up the SPC outlooks from all my 2003 to present chases (2002 was not available). Storm intercepts will likely be the only stat which won't be updated in previous year's logs simply because I won't know. Aside from that, the overall appearance of the log won't change. Text and images to the bottom will be the rule.
The photo album pages will basically be just thumbnails now instead of image descriptions. Below the thumbnails will have links to logs which those images are from as well as any video clips related to the image gallery. With high-speed internet the majority now, I'll put all my images on one page. Lightning, tornadoes, flooding, and scenic albums will exist.
I still haven't decided on the index page yet. Will continue to play with that idea as I move along.
Several painstaking processes going on in conjunction with the facelift. I am going through and watermarking all my images and bringing them all down to the same width (500). This will take a while. I have completed all my lightning images with this process as part of working on the album, but have a ways to go.
I am also going to start uploading video to YouTube here soon. I am going to put YouTube to heavy use and capture a lot of older video clips over there to use in my website. I want to include a lot of media in the new design. This will probably be the only thing coming with the new site which will be available as I go. Some of the images may get changed over along the way, but I plan to completely remove the current site and send up the new one. I won't waste much time before then changing out images.
A final note, I have incorporated a java insert in several pieces of my site. In trying my best to keep stats, mileage, and alerts current, I have found myself having to update multiple pages with a new number. This lead to wasted time and mis-matched numbers on different pages. Thanks to some java code, I have created a series of text files which I can go in and update once. The different pages then call up the text and insert the updated values. This will save me a ton of time and make for quicker updates since I am no longer editing a page. I can do this straight over the net. My chase alert, current mileage, and current position will all be done this way. Several other pieces will be done as like this as well pending the amount of updates I do.
I'm thinking there's a good chance I'll finish with my website long before the New Year date I threw out earlier. With that in mind, I'll probably fire up this new site before then, but will still keep that as my date of launch as I play with it and make other changes. I'll keep you posted as I near completion.
Fall is definately trying to get here. Temps in the 60s today after a cold front came through last night and knocked 30 degrees off the temps. It is sooo nice here right now!
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