At first I thought the media calling this kid “Balloon Boy” was pretty funny.  I mean, how could that not make you think of the “Bubble Boy” from Seinfeld?  And sure, the media coverage of this story is finally dying down but what does strike me as concerning is the fact that this guy is constantly being referred to as a serious ‘Storm Chaser.’  That couldn’t be further from the truth!  But not all is lost as finally an article appeared telling our side of the story.

Times Online Story

I’m glad they used quotes from my blog as well as Tony Laubach’s because this guy is a joke, fraud, and a bad parent.  I hope charges are filed and the actual storm chasing community can move on without this tarnishing our reputation any further.  Let us never speak of this guy again…

Scott

Phone Geek Scott here and all I will say is peep the MLB game tonight and you’re sure to see a new aggressive ad campaign from Verizon about their new Android phones coming.  The phones in question are the HTC Imagio (called the Hero on Sprint), and the Motorola Droid (which is the one I’m salivating over).  Supposedly these ads will be focused around what these phones can do and what the iPhone can’t; what Verizon is now calling the “iDoesn’t”  I guess those ‘iPhone coming to Verizon soon!’ thoughts are no longer.  Also this is very unlike Verizon to actually promote a phone instead of their network in their ads.  Just one other bit of info regarding this; is it just a coincidence that if you visit http://www.droiddoes.com it takes you to the Verizon homepage?

**UPDATE**

As usual, I was right on the dot!  Hahaha…here’s the commercial: Youtube

I gotta admit, it puts a smile on my face…

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a...storm chasers experiment gone awry

I thought my eyes were deceiving me, but all of a sudden breaking news confirmed that there was a runaway weather balloon out near Hudson.  Apparently, an avid storm chaser had been constructing this balloon to launch in to storms but today it got loose and up it went.  Some thought the family’s 6 year old kid Falcon (irony) was in it as it soared away but when it landed, he wasn’t to be found.  The thing looked kind of like a UFO and was designed to be a foil type of craft.  I know nothing about airplanes and the such, but it made a pretty soft landing.  After it landed, authorities moved in and started pitchforking it to deflate it.  I thought if that kid was in there, he was going to be terrified!  He wasn’t in there.

UPDATE: I’ve been at work all afternoon and didn’t get to see this thing play out, BUT it sounds like it was a hoax the whole time.  I’m not even really sure if this guy is a storm chaser as I’m familiar with or know most of the Colorado chasers and I’ve never heard of this dude…ever.  Anyway, the family did an interview on CNN and the kid even says “we did it for the show.”  Hahahahahahaha!!!!  Duped everyone, myself included.  Now that the kid is okay, I can fully admit I was laughing my ass off the whole time I was watching this go down.  Oh man.  Absolutely made my week.  I just pictured some X-Files nerds freaking out that their homemade UFO got loose somehow.  Plus it was airing on every national news station in the country!  Everyone must think we are a bunch of lunatics here in Colorado.  Very entertaining television today.  Thanks again Heene family!

Season 3 of Storm Chasers premiers this Sunday at 8pm MT.  There is a 2 hour Storm Chasers “Greatest Storms” airing before that as well.  My guess is that it’ll be a 2 hour recap of the previous 2 seasons before they start with the new season.  Be on the look out for the TWISTEX crew in the new season which is a Colorado based team with some people on it I know.  Also there is supposedly another show called Tornado Road which was going to be airing on NBC at some point but they canned it.  Turns out now that NBC has bought TWC, they are rumored to have brought the show back and are going to be airing it on Sunday night as well on The Weather Channel.  I really know nothing about this show but will look out for it.  Like most chasers, these shows to me are part good, part bad but I’ll be watching nonetheless.

On a rather slow night at work I was sitting there letting my mind wander and not shockingly, it drifted towards storm chasing.  Normally the thoughts that occupy my mind in that kind of situation are simple like, “is there going to be a good chase day over my weekend?” or “can’t wait to get home to check the models for tomorrow” or something along those lines.  But tonight for some reason my thoughts not only involved storm chasing, but also a previous hobby of mine that I did for a very long time; DJ’ing.

Almost everyone who knows me, remembers a pretty successful (at least I like to think it was) 5 years or so where I was playing records all over the city.  I loved DJ’ing.  I liked controlling the room, I liked people telling me they dug the records I was playing, I liked meeting people, and most importantly I loved the fact that I did it all on my own.  I was completely self-taught.  I didn’t have any DJ friends that showed me how to mix, or beat match, or scratch or anything really.  I had to learn all of that shit on my own.  I worked so hard at it.  I finally started landing some gigs and actually got pretty good at it, but I had to learn it from scratch like it was a new instrument.  It drives me nuts when people say a DJ isn’t a musician or that a turntable isn’t an instrument.  It’s such a narrow minded way of looking at it.  And trust me, if you ever heard any of the first mixes I did, you’d realize that I was like a person picking up a guitar for the first time and saying, “okay, so how does this thing work?”  They were rough to say the least.

Anyway, storm chasing has been a lot like that for me so far.  Just like when I got my first turntables, I don’t have any meteorology friends that are out there holding my hand to tell me what I’m seeing or to point me in the right direction of the right storm.  It’s been all trial and error for me.  Mostly error.  But I’m learning little by little and getting better at it.  And chase by chase, the “error’s” are getting less frequent.  Exactly the same thing that happened when I was learning the ropes of DJ’ing.  Storm chasing has been the only other hobby I’ve ever had that I’ve fully invested myself in 100% like I did with DJ’ing.  If there’s a book about storm chasing, I read it.  If someone links me to an interesting article, I’ll read it…probably about 5 times to fully absorb it.  I can’t get enough information about weather.  When I see a new book, or a new website or a new blog where I can learn more, I pounce on it.  I’ve read every book by Tim Vazquez about 30 times.  When I screw up on a chase, I immediately start investigating what I did wrong as soon as I walk in the door of my house.  And that’s the exact sort of thing I did when I DJ’ed.  I would spend hours in the basement of Twist N’ Shout digging through hundreds and hundreds of records looking for that one song no one else had.  I’d spend 6 hours digging through records and if I left with even 1 good find, it was a success for me.  When I wasn’t playing out at night or in school, I’d be busy at home working on my skills.  I ate, drank, and breathed DJ’ing.  Now storm chasing has become what DJ’ing used to be to me.  But my passion and desire to be good at both of these things isn’t the only thing they eerily have in common.  The evolution in technology for both are very similar.

When I first started DJ’ing, a brand spanking new technology had just come out that really peaked my interest.  Pioneer had just made and developed the first ever CD turntable.  It was fantastic.  I loved the idea of being able to mix some of my CD’s in with vinyl records because as hard as I would look, some shit I just couldn’t find on vinyl (this was before eBay blew up where now you can find ANYTHING on vinyl).  So I forked out some serious cash and bought two Pioneer CDJ100’s.  They were the Technics 1200’s/GRLevel3 of CD mixers.  No one else I knew had em’.  And guess what?  I’d tell other DJ’s about how I was mixing CD’s and they would give me the look of death.  ”It’s not vinyl?” they’d ask.  ”That shit’s whack dude.”  See, because there was a serious stigma that went with DJ’ing.  Vinyl records were the only way to DJ.  No if’s, and’s, or but’s about it.  And please don’t get me wrong here, I’m not claiming to be the OG of CD mixing however, any club I ever played at never had them.  So I started lugging my Pioneer’s around with my record crates and now my book of CD’s.  I’d have to rig up the CD players to somehow function on the mixer at the club to make it work.  Other DJ’s would pop in the booth during my sets and see me integrating their good ol’ vinyl records with tracks I had on CD and they’d kind of do a double take like, “whoa, how the fuck does that work?”  As time went along, CD’s became pretty standard.  DJ’s loved carrying around a CD wallet instead of 4 milk crates full of records.  And now currently, CD players have been pretty much collecting dust as the new laptop setups have made things even easier and more convenient.  DJ’s now days can hold their entire record collection on a thumb drive which fits in their pockets.

Me mixing CD's (gasp!) at Blue Ice in 2000 or so...

Sounds familiar don’t it storm chaser folks?!  Ahh technology.  I see the same thing happen in storm chasing.  The vinyl record storm chaser thinks your laptop in your car is “whack.”  Whatever happened to good ol’ hand drawn map analysis?  That’s the way we had to do it before Al Gore made the internet.  Storm chasing used to be watching the morning’s forecast on the news and winging it from there.  Head to your local NWS office and see what advice they have.  No if’s, and’s, or but’s about it.  You had to dig for your information just like I had to dig for unique records.  But just like in DJ’ing, technology in storm chasing goes from being cheating and whack to being accepted and standard.  Now if a DJ wants a hard to find track, they do a Google search and have the file downloaded and ready to go in a matter of minutes.  They don’t have to go to the record store and sift through thousands of records to get it.  I had to put in the work and these new guys don’t have to do things like that anymore.  I used to resent that so much!  But now I accept it.  That’s life.  That’s how these things work.  If you asked a storm chaser ten years ago if mobile radar, cell phone tethering, gps integration to a website, live streaming video, or any of the other things we all see as standard today, would be possible, they’d say you would have to be a millionaire to do such things.  But that’s technology.

I guess my point here other than to illustrate how similar DJ’ing and storm chasing have been to me on a personal level is to also point out that being a snobby traditionalist is no good.  Let me put it this way;  if I went out to see a DJ play a set and all of a sudden his laptop took a dump and he was forced to spin vinyl records all night, I think that would be amazing and I’d love to see it.  The same way, I absolutely respect and admire chasers who are willing to close their laptops every once in awhile and say, “fuck it, lets do some hand analysis today.”  Bottom line for me is you can embrace new technology but still respect your roots at the same time.  It doesn’t have to be a “one or the other” situation.  So don’t let those vinyl only, anti-laptop people push you around!  And also let me disclaimer this whole post by saying, I haven’t DJ’ed seriously in about 6 years or so, and I’ve only been seriously storm chasing for about 3 years so my whole perspective might be out of touch to begin with…

So yeah, that’s where my mind wandered tonight as I watched Usain Bolt smash another world record in the IAAF’s.  That dude is super good.  See, now my mind is wandering again…usually the sign it’s bed time for me.

Scott

Pretty wild day down in eastern and south eastern Colorado this afternoon with 12 reports of tornadoes largely concentrated around the Hugo area.  Also a massive hail storm dropped baseball’s right in downtown Pueblo which has caused a ton of damage.  I wasn’t chasing this event as I worked from 3-11pm.  Unfortunately it doesn’t look like any of the usual CO Chaser gang was on it either.  Sometimes I hate being employed!  Hahaha, all kidding aside, I will look forward to the damage surveys to see what the scope and magnitude on some of these were.  In my head I’m just imagining they were all completely rain wrapped so had I been there anyway, I wouldn’t have seen them.  Yes, that will do…

Scott

***UPDATE***

Courtesy Laura Ming/NOAA

So much for the rain wrapped theory.  Man!

This is nothing weather related by any means, but thought it would be funny to post a quick write up of my very first indoor skydiving adventure.  My dad generously bought my brother, mom, and myself a few “jumps” at the indoor skydiving place over by Park Meadows for Christmas last year.  Well, last Sunday we finally got around to it.

The experience wasn’t quite what I expected it to be.  I was nervous before I got to the place, but after I walked in, the nerves were gone.  For those thinking that indoor skydiving could be a ‘thrill ride’ type of outing, don’t bother.  I’ll put it this way; there’s nothing extreme or on the edge about floating in a wind tunnel with your aunt two feet away from you asking you to smile more for the camera.  Hahaha…

Anyway, an instructor is in the chamber with you the entire time and trust me, you need them.  I was pretty bad at it and had terrible form.  Either my legs were too bent, or my arms weren’t high enough, etc.  You need all of these things to get a decent flight.  I spent most of my time floating near the bottom or hitting my face on the glass.  The instructor was giving me hand signals as to what I needed to fix but I couldn’t get it.  It was very hard to focus with 100+mph wind in your face (this coming from a storm chaser?!).  My mom kicked the shit out of all of us which was pretty amazing!

This outing didn’t cost me a penny, so I shouldn’t complain.  I got to do something I’ve never done before and got to spend time with the family and that’s the bottom line.  However, my advice to anyone thinking of doing this is, don’t.  It’s way too expensive for what little you get.  Thrill seekers should probably go real skydiving.

Youtube Link of Scott’s Failed Skydive

The youtube video features a little pre-game,  both of my failure jumps and a quick edit of how well my mom did.  Big thanks to my aunt Susan for filming!

Scott

(not coordinated in any way)

2009 has come to an end folks, and what a strange year it has been.  The action was good early, and late but the middle really was awful.  The first week of vacation I had in May, I didn’t go chase one single day.  I admit I started to lose the faith in the season and was pretty disgusted that I wasted a week of vacation.  However, things changed pretty quickly and in late May, we got a few local chases in which got the blood going again.  Then my second week of vacation which was the first week of June, we chased almost every single day.  So it looked bleak for a minute, but had a good ending.  

This year I saw 4 tornadoes and countless funnels, wall clouds, severe thunderstorms, large hail, and just about anything else one could consider extreme weather.  The tornadoes weren’t glorious or huge by any means but still a thrill for us nonetheless.  Also this was the first year where John and I really dedicated ourselves to chasing.  In the past, we had just gone out not too far from home if there was something possible and it happened to fall on one of our days off from work.  

Tornadoes:

- First was in Kimball, Nebraska which spawned from the same monster cell that produced the infamous Vortex 2 tornado in La Grange Wyoming.

- Numbers 2, 3, & 4 were in Elbert County Colorado on that fateful Monday when, had I left a few hours earlier for Kansas, would’ve completely missed them.  What a day that was!  Other than Verne Carlson, I saw no other chasers on that cell at all.

Close Calls:

- I know John will completely agree with me when I say that it was the insane bow in Colby Kansas on the drive home on June 1st.  I’m still not sure John realizes how much trouble we could’ve been in that night.  When we were sitting on the side of the road in the core of the storm laughing, filming lightning and having a grand ol’ time, I had no idea that a few minutes later the laughter would turn into, “Dude, I know you can’t see the road but get us the hell out of here right now!”  After I got done filming the lightning and insane winds in that storm, I decided to do a quick radar scan which put us in the dead center of a tornado warned area with 3 TVS markers right around us and a few reports of funnels from spotters on that exact highway.  Not good!  Obviously we made it to Colby and I have never been so happy to see a dive bar in the middle of nowhere that served Corona’s in my life.  That could’ve been really bad and I definitely learned a valuable lesson that night.

Disappointments:

- My first chase out in late April wasn’t a stellar effort to say the least.  I headed out early targeting south central Kansas, particularly Ulysses.  I made it there just fine but all the action was way down south where the Roll, Oklahoma and Texas Panhandle tornadoes happened.  Terrible forecast on my part.  There was no chance in hell I was ever going to make it there in time.  So I sat on the side of the highway as the sun was setting somewhere near Guymon watching everyone else’s streams of the tornadoes on-line.  It was absolute torture.

-  Missing the La Grange tornado hurt quite a bit even though we did collect the consolation prize with the Kimball Nebraska rope.  What particularly hurt was the fact that we were thinking about the Wyoming target that day and opted for the NE Colorado target instead.  That was painful to watch on GR3.  But again, we did still get a tornado that day so it wasn’t a complete wash.

Other Stuff:

- Huge, huge, huge thanks to John Winters for being my chase partner most of the year.  I know you’re still mad about the Elbert County thing!  John was a fucking rock star this year driving wherever I told him to go and was such a big part of us getting to the good storms.  Thanks again guy (in my best South Park style Canadian accent)!

- Also a super huge thanks to Kory Hartman and all the guys at SevereStudios.com who helped me out with my streaming this year.  Those guys are total pro’s always helping me out when I had a problem.  I doubt any of them will ever read this but they are certainly the way to go when it comes to streaming.  Such a great site and service.  Thank you again!

- Also a big thanks to my parents who thought I was out of my mind a few years ago when I started getting into this.  Now my dad watches my stream and tracks along with Spotter Network whenever I am out.  They also helped me out with getting my new chase vehicle that got us out of a lot of jams this year.  Love you guys!  

- Lastly, thanks to all the fellow Colorado chasers who’ve given us very kind words of encouragement this year.  I know John and I are still kind of the new guys, but we’ve certainly appreciated all the advice and nice things people have said to us.  We aren’t meteorology experts by any means as I’m sure you’ve ascertained, but we are out there learning new things every day.  We really hope to meet some of the people we’ve always talked to either online or through texting while out on the chase like the Carlson’s, Dann Cianca, etc.  We’ll make the next chaser convergence at Old C’s for sure or you guys should come to my BBQ on the 27th!

What’s Next:

- We will obviously continue to chase any decent setups that happen this summer of course and put up all the half way decent pictures and terrible video on this site when we get home.

- Already starting to think about some upgrades for next year.  We’ve got to go HD!  And next year I promise I will shoot that HD from a tripod because my filming sucks, I know!  Also, I really need to invest in a decent wide angle lens for my Canon.  Shooting weather with a wide angle is the way to go.  I also need to learn how to shoot lightning.  I went out last night and had a great vantage point but couldn’t get shit!  So frustrating.

- Various upgrades to the Pathfinder will include better headlights, and some better tires to get us through the mud.  John’s gotta like that…Maybe a brush guard to make us look a little meaner.  Hahaha…

Anyway, that was our season.  Nothing spectacular compared to some others, but we had an insane amount of fun.  I was explaining to a co-worker a few weeks ago that I was taking vacation time to go storm chasing and what he said really sums it up.  He said, “Some people go to Hawaii for vacation, you go to Topeka.”  Damn right!

Until next April,

Scott

Welcome to my new blog fully dedicated to our storm chasing season of 2009. Myself along with my usual cohorts will be out storm chasing for a good portion of the month of May. We’re very excited about this season because it will be the first that we are truly, fully, 100% dedicated to chasing. In previous years we always would get out there when we could on weekends or days off, but this year we’ve dedicated ourselves fully for nearly 4 weeks.

We’ve also stepped up and improved our chasing capabilities by adding an array of new equipment to our chase vehicle. In fact, by next Monday we should have a brand new chase vehicle that we can use for this season. I’m looking at a 2002 Nissan Pathfinder that will hopefully be sitting in front of my house in a few days! We should have no more radar issues this year as I’ve switched from AT&T back to Verizon and added a Cyfre wireless cell amplifier. Also, I’m now a licensed HAM operator and have added a brand new Yaesu FT-7800R dual band mobile ham radio to the vehicle. We can now stay in touch with other chasers in the field and get real time updates on all NOAA radio bands. Lastly, we will be streaming our chases live to this website every day we are out chasing. This stream will be integrated through the Severestreaming.com servers. So on days we are out and on a storm, viewers can come to this website to watch live or over at severestudios.com where they can see our feed and hundreds of other chasers who are out in the field as well. This stream will also be integrated with our GPS unit and SpotterNetwork.org to show exactly where we are when we are streaming.

So, that’s it for now. I think this season is going to be very exciting and we’ve set some pretty ambitious goals but I have no doubt we can live up to them. We’re still pretty new to chasing and getting out there in the field is the greatest way to learn. Our chase starts May 5th, see everyone out there.