2020 Storm Chase
After many months in my NYC apartment, when my semester ended I was completely burned out. It took me a while to get caught up, and then—finally—I was ready to hit the road for my annual storm chasing trip. Ideally storm chasing you'd just drive to Kansas, chase storms for a week, and then head home. Sadly, that's not the way the weather works. Instead, you follow the wind. You don't know where you'll be sleeping when you wake up. So I ended up chasing 5243 miles and--my goal--got to whatever weather there was each day. Being 2020, an abnormally low tornado year, I didn't see any on this trip, but I did have some fun storm days.
June 21 was my first chase day in my favorite place to chase: Kansas, which culminated in a truly spectacular sunset.
The next day I was down in New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle
Here’s a video of a bunch of time lapses from the trip, including me getting my favorite photo from above:
June 23 was a marginal chase day but I did camp on some slow moving storms in north eastern New Mexico, ending up in south eastern Colorado (also see time lapse above):
June 24 was a long driving day to get in position in South Dakota, but I did see a beautiful sunset in northern Nebraska after driving through a million bugs
June 25 was a fun day surfing a shelf cloud in South Dakota:
The severe weather then shifted back east, so I followed it along and got stuck in the terrain in northern Illinois and then got stuck in torrential downpours driving around Chicago, and my hotel in Indiana even got its power knocked out. But there wasn’t much photogenic on that day. The next day heading towards New York I saw a big storm all the way across Lake Erie:
And heading home I got on a severe storm near Newburgh, NY:
Of course COVID-19 was the biggest storm I had to contend with this year. In 10 days on the road I didn't interact with another human for more than 15 seconds checking into a hotel, and then from a distance. I brought my own food and peed by the side of the road because masks and social distancing declined exponentially leaving NYC approaching zero by the time I got to Illinois. In West Virginia, in a hotel breakfast area about the size of my apartment, there was 15-20 people with no masks. I just walked past and straight out to the car and I'm not sure if they were staring at me because I had a mask on or because I hadn't had a hair cut in several months, Corporations are taking it seriously--I saw only one drive in fast food place (Arby's) that took no preparation and the two Walmarts I went to to stock up had probably the highest mask utilization (100% amongst employees and probably 60% amongst the patrons). But in the Walmart parking lot in Indiana I saw four strangers—people who were apparently checking out a used car for sale—riding around in the same car. Hilton has a "clean stay" program which was in effect at about 50% of the ten hotels I stayed in. Most hotels took precautions and gyms were closed, breakfast was curtailed and most had a plastic barrier at the check in (but the unmasked employee in Amarillo stepped around the barrier to give me my keys). In South Dakota, at the breakfast area the employee handing out food was fully masked and gloved but the three other people who did not know each other were crowding up the station--maskless of course--ignoring the obvious social distance marks. I stayed 10 feet away until they all left and then took my food back to my room. In Kansas, the Casino was open (I didn't go in). I saw (from a distance) bars and and strip clubs all open along the route. Thanks to social media I wasn't too lonely, although I realize how much I miss those little interactions with waitresses and gas station attendants or talking weather with strangers who roll up when you're watching a storm. So while it was a good trip, I'm so glad to be back in NYC where we're taking this crisis seriously.
Full set of photos here.
And I was welcomed home to Brooklyn with a new fisheye lens and a severe thunderstorm!
