A Year in Review, Pt. 1

Well, my first posts is ending up being my last posts...of my storm chasing "fiscal" year I should say :)

2008 was the first year I went for storms, mostly inside of eastern Iowa. From about January-April 2008 I was in training mode. I had mostly gone by ear on things I had learned about storm systems, mostly scouring Wikipedia to get general information. But I finally decided I wanted to learn how to forecast and predict what was going on.

With the help of these great sites, I was on my way:

• Mr. Jeff Haby's website (http://www.theweatherprediction.com, a great website for everything weather/storms, very technical articles)
• Mike Hollingshead's Storm 101 DVD (http://extremeinstability.com , check out his website, awesome chaser with great chase accounts)
• StormTrack (http://www.stormtrack.org , a great storm chaser community, very informative and always has forecasting and chase accounts for pretty much every storm system)
• NOAA Storm Prediction Center
  

At the beginning of the year I went out with a printout from the last SPC convective outlook, and any mesoscale discussion (if there was). From April-early May I went with just that, watching the storms as they passed, analyzing structure. Mid May I went and got a Nikon D40 DSLR to get my documenting on the way.

I'm going to pick three chases that were memorable,
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The first storm I caugt was a very memorable; May 25th. I caught the Parkersburg, IA storm as it just spawned the tornado that hit that town, and was passing through Hazelton.

I was at Lake Delhi that day, just south of Manchester, Ia...decided to sum up some guts and go after it. I didn't get many shots (was the first week I had my camera)

Coming back to Delhi, shelf cloud close on my tail



Back at the lakehouse, decided to hunker down and watch it pass by. Was a strange view on the whole thing. It was quite calm here, but I knew that Parkersburg was being destroyed.


Dark to light, seeing more crisp view of the southern section.


You know I didn't see much of that storm, but it was a defining moment in my short chasing career so far.

In my next two review posts I'll have a lot more to talk about and a lot more pictures. So I'll gather the good shots from those, and I'll post again soon! :)

-Aaron