Wednesday was a double-header for me, weatherly speaking. Round one took the form of a reporter from Grand Rapids Magazine, who came over to interview me about storm chasing. It was fun, but I”m afraid I may have overwhelmed Tom with my ramblings. I fell victim to the loose firehose syndrome: too much to say, and it all came cascading out in a torrent of technical information, chase anecdotes, radar and forecast model demos, names of fellow chasers, random chasing insights, blah, blah, all thrashing around in different, loosely connected directions. I hope Tom is able to make sense out of it all.\r\n\r\nWith the interview over, I left to go practice what I had just finished preaching. Michigan lay under a light risk area, and the radar showed storms firing to the north along a stationary front, and a squall line blowing in across Lake Michigan from Wisconsin. I called my buddy Kurt Hulst, and we hooked up and took off for the Lake Michigan shoreline south of Douglas. The storms weren”t particularly severe, but they were breathtakingly photogenic, and in addition to some great shots of a spectacular arcus cloud, I got some of my first captures of lightning with my new camera.\r\n\r\nEnough talk. Here are some images. Pardon the tilted horizon line in the last two. I didn”t know the lake could slant like that; no doubt it has something to do with the gravitational influence of the moon. Some may suggest that the photographer was the root cause. Don”t make me laugh! How on earth can little old me create a seiche of that magnitude in one of the Great Lakes? No, the more I think of it, the more certain I am it was the moon.\r\n\r\n
\r\nShelf cloud over Lake Michigan south of Douglas\r\n\r\n
\r\nA minute later\r\n\r\n
\r\nView to the northeast\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\nChaotic skies behind the gust front\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\nLooking south along the shoreline\r\n\r\n
\r\nLightning over Lake Michigan
