August 23 Lightning over Caledonia

Last night brought a nice electrical display to the Michigan skies, and my little town of Caledonia was smack in the center of the action.

Today looks to present still more possibilities. With a cold front sweeping in to kick up around 3,000 J/kg CAPE in the presence of 45 knots 0-6 km shear and adequate low-level helicity, southern Michigan is outlooked for a 5 percent tornado risk. It had to happen sometime. Looks like today could be play day for my area on toward the southeast part of the state.

But that’s for later this afternoon, and this post is about last night with its lightning extravaganza. I had initially set up shop in a parking on the edge of town off of 100th Street, but when the action appeared to be migrating south of me, I dropped down six miles to Middleville. Eventually I wound up

back in Caledonia just a couple hundred yards from where I had initially positioned myself. That’s where I got the dramatic shot of the big bolt at the top of this post, as well as the rest of the night-time photos.

For that matter, the earlier photos were also taken in Caledonia. The color in those photos is pretty true. I was captivated by the bluish hue and undulating, textured look of the clouds. Really beautiful, and quite something to see.

Low-Topped Supercell Images from Last Wednesday

Last Wednesday, May 11, in northwest Kansas was a bust chase as far as tornadoes were concerned. But the prairie sky offers compensations that are blue-ribbon prizes in their own right if you’ve got an eye for beauty.

Here are some shots of a couple of low-topped supercells taken in the Atwood/Oberlin area. These storms dumped some marble-sized hail and exhibited visible, though not strong, rotation. They were lovely to behold, sculptures of moisture shaped by the wind and lit by the light of the waning evening. Atmospheric dramas such as these are the true panorama of the Great Plains. Like a run-on sentence, the treeless landscape stretches off into limitless sameness, leaving the sky to provide punctuation, energy, and color.

Yet Another Update: Huge Progress!

I know I’ve been posting a lot of status updates concerning Stormhorn.com. Maybe I’m guilty of overkill, but I feel it’s better to let you know what’s going on with this blog than keep you wondering.

And the fact is, a LOT has been going on. I should have scrapped my old NexGen plugin weeks ago, done the reinstall, and gotten on with replacing my image files. I didn’t because all I could think was, “Oh, man, all those files!” Nearly 500 of them. But as it turns out, reinstalling them hasn’t been nearly the prolonged hassle that I thought it would be–not that it isn’t time-consuming grunt work, but the process is moving along just fine. Much better, in fact, than I expected.

Image Files Are Now Largely Restored

That’s right–I’ve got the bulk of my galleries back in place. The work certainly isn’t finished, but right now, if you go to my photo page, you’ll see that most of what used to be there is back where it was. Well, sort of. I took the opportunity to do a little reorganizing, but that’s a good thing that brings a little more order to my collection. Anyway, just about all of my storm photos are back in place. Ditto my wildflower, bird, and other images. Check ’em out!

The CopyFox Has Reopened for Business

One of the worst parts of this whole debacle was having to take my CopyFox page and subpages offline. There was no alternative. Nothing looks worse than a copywriting business site that’s having communication issues!

But huzzah! The days of woe are past and the time of jubilation is at hand! The CopyFox now has its very own website, which is how things should have been from the beginning. Bang the drums, bring on the jugglers and dancing bears, and let there be music in the streets! And by all means, check out the site at www.thecopyfox.com.

What Still Needs Doing

Now that I’ve got the bulk of my image files downloaded, I need to sift through my posts one by one and restore images to their proper places. There are also plenty of galleries that still need to be downloaded.

But so much has already been accomplished. This blog is essentially well on its way to complete recovery. And even as I sort backwards through past posts, you may notice that Stormhorn.com is also moving ahead with new posts that will keep storm chasers current on the incoming spring weather season and equip jazz musicians with fresh food for thought and material for the woodshed.

So there you have it. The news is all good. Thanks for your continued interest and loyalty to this site as it endures its growing pains. I’ve been amazed and encouraged to see that traffic has not only remained consistent through the worst of it, but now appears to be experiencing some impressive growth. Having changed to a new web host, I’m not sure yet how accurate my WordPress stats are–perhaps they are inflating the numbers and need to settle in a bit; but I think that Awstats is pretty dependable, and assuming that’s the case, then March is off to an awesome start.

So again, thanks for bearing with me. And stay tuned, because repairs are being made rapidly at this point.

Goodonya,

Bob