A vivid display of the Auroras Borealis or Northern Lights erupted
late Friday, Aug. 5th and continued well past midnight over Central
Minnesota. The light show was caused when a coronal mass ejection (CME)
hit Earth’s magnetic field and sparked a G4-category geomagnetic storm
according NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction Space
Weather Prediction Center.
The bright green aurora was highlighted with pink, red and purple colors as it pulsated for several hours. At times it was bright enough to shine though the high thin lay of clouds that moved over the area.
8/6/2011 Auroras Borealis “NorthernLights” over central Minnesota
Today I was out in the severe storms that hit central Minnesota during the afternoon with storms firing up in Stearns County before moving into the Twin Cities Metro area.
This video was shot in Southern Stearns County on the county line south of Paynesville, MN. The storms hit the area with high winds, heavy rain, lightning and even a weak wall cloud that tried to produce a funnel.
Well today was an interesting day for the chase. On my way home from a heavy rain event southwest of home, I found this German Sheppard on Highway 15 and Interstate 94 south of Saint Cloud, Minnesota while driving home after the storms. She was in the road and I stopped to see if she had a name tag to bring her home, she did not.
Lost dog found
She is extremely friendly and jumped right in the back of my truck when I opened the back door for her. I did not want her to get hit by a passing vehicle on the road so I took her with me into town to look for the owner.
I called the one person that posted a lost and found on Craigslist for a German Sheppard and met up with them but this was not their dog. They did agree to take in this dog to try and help find the owner and bring her in to scan for an RFID tag.
They did say that they were called about this dog since they lost their dog and this dog was found and left at a farm about 10 miles from where I found it so I can only assume that she is trying to find her family and her way home. If you recognize this dog, please contact us and I will put you in touch with the person we left her with.
Here are the smaller photo of the German Sheppard. Just click on each photo to view the larger photo.
Just getting my blog updated from this weekend. Severe storms and a
tornado warned storm impacted the Kandiyohi County area to the south of
Willmar, MN.
The slow moving storms made for some great time lapse video as the storms virtually sat in place.
The video shows a great looking thunderstorm with a wall cloud and
possible weak funnel cloud under it that was very brief before falling
apart.
Also in this video is a time lapse of the storm from the dash camera to show the storm motion.
One of my favorite weather events to document is not hurricanes,
blizzards, lightning or even tornadoes, it is the Aurora Borealis or the
Northern Lights.
This weekend I went up to a spot I found last year on Leech Lake.
For those of you that don’t know about Leech Lake in Northern
Minnesota, it is a huge lake that covers 112,000 surface acres or 175
square miles of surface area. In short, that lake is huge and makes for
a great back drop for a wide open space to watch the Auroras up in
Northern, Minnesota. The down side, it is way up north and takes
several hours to drive up there from our home in Saint Cloud, MN.
Shot a couple of interesting photos of me while my cameras were busy doing the time lapse video of the event. I always wanted to do a photo where I was sitting under the Auroras and here was my chance.
Doug Kiesling reading the book Tornado Alley by Howard Bluestein under Aurora Borealis Doug Kiesling reading the book Tornado Alley by Howard Bluestein under Aurora Borealis
Anyway, here is the video of the Geomagnetic Storm on Sunday Morning that caused a disturbance in the geomagnetic field of the earth caused by gusts in the solar wind that blows by planet.
Auroras over Leech Lake, MN
The earth was hit by a G2 or Moderate Geomagnetic Storm.
Footage shot Time Lapse with one frame about every second to show the motion of the auroras in full HD 1080 24P.
It’s been awhile since I posted anything but I have been really busy if you have been following the BNVN.com blog with working the news desk here but there is something I wanted to write about.
I was able to get away this past week for a trip to Kansas to go and pick up a new truck, I had a lot of time to think about and to talk to a lot of my storm chasing friends about the large number of recent deaths due to the tornadoes over the last six weeks.
Several hundred people have died in April and May due to the tornado outbreaks which seems pretty crazy with the advanced warnings. Tornado warning times are now longer than ever but yet so many people have died which does not make any sense.
Why are there so many deaths from the storms?
There has never been any documented death of someone storm chasing who was known to be a storm chaser ether to their friends and family or within the storm chasing community. There have been some EMS personal hurt and even killed spotting for their community but no real “Storm Chasers” have been killed storm chasing.
So what some of my friends and I have come up with is the only thing we can think of regarding the large number of tornado deaths over the past two months is that part of the deaths may be due to what is know as “Life Imitating Art”, by untrained artists…
That is the reason why I took on the name Weather Paparazzi was because of the term Paparazzi or Paparazzo which is defined by Websters “as a freelance photographer”. So Weather Paparazzi means that I work freelance to document the weather for a living. I photograph all kinds of stuff in nature from storms, wildlife and even scuba diving. I am a professional photographer, unlike the many people that are now documenting severe storms.
Unlike scuba diving where you need sign up to a class with an instructor and learn to scuba dive without killing yourself with the bends or drowning, anyone can grab a camera and film a storm and be called a “Storm Chaser”.
So this got me wondering, how many videos like this one that was shot by Eric Meyers, the Navarro County emergency management coordinator are out there but were filmed by the people that were killed in the recent tornadoes?
General Public going to kill themselves.
The report said “Meyers rode out the tornado inside a vehicle and videotaped the twister as it tore the roof off a school about a block away.” Wow, someone that knows weather and is the emergency management coordinator could not drive away and focus on calling in reports since this is obviously not dash camera footage but hand held footage.
Yes, I think that Eric Meyers, the Navarro County emergency management coordinator should be thrown out of his position due to the fact that he did not have enough sense to stay out of the tornado and focus staying safe but put himself into a position of adding to the body count.
His video is not the only crazy video from someone that is not a chaser but trying to video tape a storm. This video shows how stupid someone could be around a tornado but still grabs the video camera to film the tornado.
Car get hit by tornado with Driver in it
When I saw this video I knew that the number of tornado deaths now has got to be tied to the number of people trying to get video of the tornadoes without concern for their personal safety.
Now someone is going to say “but you filmed them close to you too” and yes I have and I know when to back off to get out of the debris field. I also have WXWorx with me while chasing along with having internet radar and GPS to know where I am in relation to the storm. I also plan escape routes using the GPS map setup so if I get in a bad spot, I can get out of the way.
She has no clue what she was doing.
So what does all this mean? I think that if some college students need a research project, I would start looking at the death toll from the April and May tornadoes and try to collect the cell phones of all the people that died to see if they were recording their last moments.
I would never want to see the footage but on a research level it would be interesting to see if the number of deaths could have been avoided if people would have taken shelter instead of trying to take video.
If as I suspect that at least 20 or more of the deaths from the Mississippi and Alabama storms from April and the Joplin, MO tornado are from the public or “Non Chasers” trying to shoot chaser video, then we have a huge problem that will only get worse over time.
If you are not a chaser and you don’t know anything about the weather but you see a tornado, don’t shoot video of it unless it is over half a mile away, there is no lightning or hail within 5 miles and you are standing in the entrance to a storm shelter where you can save yourself if the tornado hits you. Severe weather does kill and once your dead, there is no do over.
If you live in an area that gets a lot of tornadoes and you just want to see what hits your place? Go to Sams Club and buy a multi camera security system with backup power. You can sit in your storm shelter while watching what happens outside on camera before the cameras blow away.
Project Vortex or V2 spent millions on trying to expand the tornado warning times in 2009 and 2010 but what good will any expanded warning times be if that just means you have expanded time to grab a camera and stand in the path of a tornado hitting your town?
Today was my first real chance to put the new camera to a test for
lightning photography and I still need to work on some things but for
the most part the new rig worked pretty good.
I was able to get out in front of the camera for a few images with
the tower lightning in Big Lake, MN and did some cool self portraits.
Not much time for anything else but I am planning a couple of projects and a chase trip for next month along with a training trip to get the new crews up to speed with video stuff.
I’m finally going through all of my video from the 4/9/2011 chase in Iowa and here is a screen grab off the HD dash camera when it was in night shot mode.
I was driving north towards the town of Early, Iowa for this tornado late after dark… The tornado was back lit by lightning and without the lightning nobody could have seen this coming.
This was one of the dozen tornadoes that I saw on that day. It is kind of easy to get a dozen tornadoes when the thing was dropping two at the same time several times during the overnight storm track to the east north east.
