Follow the adventures of storm chaser Rebekah Lo.
Southern and eastern England has been unusually dry for the past several months. According to the Met Office, this past April was the 6th driest on record (back to 1910), the warmest, and the sunniest in the country.
The following maps from the Met Office show the actual rainfall and the rainfall anomaly for Great Britain in April (the last few months have also been dry).
Click to enlarge.
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Jeff, Esther, and I went all the way up to Pratt, Kansas yesterday, in search of some elusive supercells and tornadoes.
However, as you may already know, there were two areas with supercells and tornadoes: southwest Oklahoma and just north of I-70 in western Kansas. The only photos I took were of The Weather Channel’s “The Great Tornado Hunt” vans and crew (their new storm chasing team with Mike Bettes and more recently Jim Cantore) and a street sign in Hutchinson that read “Random Rd”.
We did drive past the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, which sounds pretty awesome. They have the largest collection of Soviet/Russian space artifacts outside of Moscow, the command module from Apollo 13, and countless other interesting items. Following my recent trips to Kennedy Space Center and my revived space interest, I plan on visiting the place some time this coming week.
Anyway, we drove 550 miles over 11 hours, and at least we did see some frequent lightning, mammatus, and heavy rain as we approached Oklahoma City from the north on our way back.
It has been nice to finally get some good, heavy rain in this area. We had a large squall line pass through last night, and had a number of other thunderstorms roll through for much of the day.
Sadly, my final spring in the Plains is not turning out to be very good for storm chasing. I’ve got just couple more weeks around here for a nice setup to materialize…
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Today could be a decent dryline day in southwest Kansas into northwest Oklahoma.
Jeff, Esther, and I are currently on our way to somewhere around Pratt, Kansas, not far from the expected intersection of a dryline and warm front. There is not much convective inhibition (there is plenty of instability), but there is also fairly weak lift, so hopefully we’ll get enough lift to have some isolated storms. If storms do form, shear is sufficient for supercells and even tornadoes.
You may remember I mentioned I had an eye exam this afternoon, but I rescheduled it for tomorrow morning. I did get my first good night of sleep in a while last night, so I’m ready for some storms now. 🙂
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This is one way to eventually get my photos and videos of my recent travels out on the web…just bit by bit. Then the task doesn’t seem as monumental. 🙂 At some point I probably ought to make some online photo albums though.
Anyway, I just posted my time lapse video of the rollback of the rotating service structure on the shuttle launch pad on Sunday. It’s sped up by 10 times. The video length is just over 2.5 minutes.
I’m quite pleased with how the video turned out! Occasionally you can see some of our group (including me) get in front of the shuttle for photos. Towards the end, you see everyone rush to the right as we were getting a group photo taken. We then rush back to the left. 🙂
Enjoy!
Space Shuttle Endeavour RSS Retraction – 15 May 2011
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Another one of my favorite launch pictures!
Please click to enlarge.
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