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.
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.
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.
