Doug Kiesling – Weather Paparazzi
I’m just giving everyone an update since its been over a week since I updated my personal blog with what the heck I have been doing.
I’ve been running the news desk here at BNVN and with the latest round of severe weather, I been getting very little sleep.
To check out all the new footage, go to http://www.bnvn.com
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.
I have finally posted the photographs from last weekends tornado chase in the photo gallery
I have finally posted the photographs from last weekends tornado chase.
It’s been a crazy couple of days since Saturday with the tornado outbreak in Iowa and now this morning with the Auroras.
I’m busy processing all the image from this weekends tornado chase but I have the Aurora Borealis – Northern Lights photos that were featured on The Weather Channel and Weather Nation now on line now.
Here are a couple of images from Saturdays storm chase in Iowa.
The second image, yes I know it’s out of focus but I was trying to hold the tripod down in 40 mph winds as the inflow was screaming into the storm.
There’s a destination a little up the road
From the habitations and the towns we …know
Where it’s at… I got Two Tornadoes and a microphone…
Wow, it has been almost a month since I updated the blog on 3/11/2011 which was the date of the 9.0 earthquake and Tsunami that Japan.
Since that date I have been pretty busy with stock footage from my friend Brian Barnes who was in Otsuchi Japan when the earthquake hit. The footage is pretty insane.
The footage shows the before, during and after that makes even my Hurricane Katrina footage look like a walk in the park.
So on top of helping Brian out and working with the production companies, I have also been focusing on BNVN and the news footage for the rest of the crews footage for the upcoming storm chasing season. We have had a lot of great footage come in over the last month so I have been pretty busy working from home for the most part.
I did make it down to the Iowa NWA conference in Des Moines last weekend and was not feeling well but I thought it was just the normal spring allergies and that getting out of the house for a few days would help. Nope, that was not the case and to make a long story short, the annoying cough that I had for the last month or two that I thought was just from having the house sealed up tight for winter and the dust and dander from Gustav, nope, that was not it. I asked my friend and now doctor, Beth if I could have Walking Pneumonia and she told me in so many direct ways to go into a urgent care and get checked.
Well I did stop into the urgent care clinic on the way home and after a few short minutes at a Urgent Care clinic I was given a prescription for antibiotics for Walking Pneumonia. The crazy part was that I never had a fever and never showed any real signs of being sick other than hacking my lungs up all the time for the last few months. Yeah, that was not fun but I can say after 5 days of taking the antibiotics, wow, I have not felt this great in months.
Going forward, April is now here and it is looking like an active weather pattern is setting up. Unfortunately, it also looks as if fuel prices are going to be over $4.00 a gallon for gas so I’m not sure how much chasing I will be doing versus running BNVN from home and only focusing on local chases along with a 10 day chase trip with friends in late May. There are just so many variables to what the future holds but unlike last year, I’m not making ANY plans for anything other than chasing or scuba diving until the end of August. Last year every time I was scheduled to do something, I missed major storm chasing days.
The magnetic field of the earth was struck by a Coronal Mass Ejection from the sun during the evening of March 10th, 2011.
Just after 11:15 P.M. the CME sparked very bright Northern Lights over Minnesota. The aurora was just a green glow on the horizon
until it looked like someone flipped a switch and turned on the lights to become bright enough to cast a shadow for a few minutes.
The Aurora event peaked about the same time as the earth quake in Japan before Midnight local time in Minnesota.
I have also posted images of this event in the photo gallery.
Here is a rare look into the past from 19 years ago. In this photo that has the date stamp on it showing it was taken in July of 1992 which is “4 BT” or four years before the movie Twister came out and made everyone want to be a chaser.
While it is not my greatest work and in the big picture of my photography, this photo is pretty bad.
What is does show is a time line of my chasing and interest in weather. Back in 1992 when everyone I knew saw that I was into chasing and weather, they thought it was pretty damn strange. Now chasing is looked at by the general public much like the X-Games on ESPN or other extreme sports.
While chasing has come a long way and has now become part of the everyday pop culture, the weather has not changed but chasing has. Now it is possible that you can find more people chasing after one super cell thunderstorm in the month of May in Kansas this spring than were even called chasers in 1992.
Heavy snow fell over central Minnesota this afternoon and caused numerous accidents along Minnesota Highway 10 just north of the city of Saint Cloud MN.
The east bound lanes of Highway 10 heading into the Twin Cities had to be shut down while rescue crews cleaned up a chain reaction pile up.
In the first part of the video, I rolled up to a truck crash scene on Highway 10, where pickup truck spun out and flipped over on its side in the center ditch of the highway. I saw some smoke rise up from the truck, I didn’t know if it was about to catch on fire or not so I set the camera on the dash and got out to check on the driver.
As soon as I got around to the other side of the truck, I found a woman and her three small children were trapped in the truck. Fortunately they were all belted other than a few shaken nerves and crying kids being scared, everyone appeared to be OK. Another motorist stopped to help as the women in the truck was able to open the drivers side window and started handing us her children before climbing out of the truck herself. The Minnesota State Patrol was on the scene in a couple of minutes and we helped them to the troopers truck.
The footage continues with several more scenes of accidents due to the poor driving conditions.
Tonight was the best Northern Lights / Aurora Borealis display in at least five years for central Minnesota.
I have waited a very long time to see the lights dance on the horizon and finally was able to show Neva what the Auroras looked like and how they danced across the sky.
We left the house after dinner and as soon as it was dark enough and clear enough to be able to see anything.
Was it cold outside? Oh you bet it was hella cold out and there is a Wind Chill Advisory just to the north of where we were watching the auroras.
I figured out the wind chill at the location that we go to that is pretty much out of the way from traffic and city lights, it was -25F with the wind chill.
Here is Neva and me while waiting for the green glow on the horizon to start doing something in the insane cold temps. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
