One year later…

What a difference one year makes.  A year ago today I woke up in Hays Kansas and was getting ready to go chasing with Chris.  The weather setup was perfect and you could not ask for a better setup then what was handed to all the chasers.  Even the yahoo’s did not need to follow chasers around to find the storms because it was like shooting fish in a barrel. 
We even met up with a cool new chaser, Brandon Clark,  that we thought was a yahoo coming to bug us but turned out it was someone that really wanted to learn how to chase and stopped to ask us if he could tag along.  We brought him along for the ride of his life over the next two days. 
Now fast forward into 2009 and were under the ridge of death.  What is the ridge of death?  It is a massive high pressure ridge that would normally setup in July or August that makes it pretty much impossible for supercell storms to fire.  That is why it is called the Ridge Of Death, it is death to the storm chasing season.
I can’t complain too much because I did meet up with Jacob and Dave last week and we did chase the one storm that defined the month of May, which was the Kirksville, MO tornado.  But since then, there has not been anything worth chasing that has been more then hours drive away.  But there still is some stuff to photograph like the lightning from early yesterday. 
Here was some cloud to cloud lightning from just north of Litchfield, MN. Time to get back to working on database stuff…

5/21/2009 Lightning just north of Litchfield, MN © Doug Kiesling