An era of storm chasing vanishing (late 1990s-late 2000s)

[Dan Robinson]

While working on the Storm Chasing Event Archive in the past couple of weeks, we've been discovering a sad reality that much of the decade of chasing from the late 90s up until as recently as 2009 has largely vanished from the internet.

It seems that as much as 90% of chaser web sites, accounts and images from that time period are simply gone - countless sites are no longer in existence. Some others that remain have removed their chase logs and images.

I understand that sometimes people move on to other things and life's priorities take the lead over maintaining a web site, but I was shocked to see so much of it just gone. So many enjoyable and inspiring images and accounts from many memorable events, by respected chasers, are no longer available.

What are the reasons? Copyright infringement? Feeling that chasing has become too popular? Chasers just giving up the hobby for one reason or another?

Maintaining a web site is relatively cheap these days (server storage and data transfer allowances are bigger and cheaper than ever before). Plus, there are many free image/video hosting solutions that make even a larger site less bandwith-intensive.

I wonder if some of you who had sites in the past might consider bringing at least part of them back, if nothing else to preserve some history and keep the spirit alive of that era of chasing. Your work definitely won't go unappreciated.

 

[Ben Holcomb]

I think websites become too cumbersome to maintain and people have moved on to social media. It's unfortunate.

By the way, if people are just looking for a place to store files and point a domain at, I could probably work something out. I have a pretty butt kickin webserver that I host a bunch of chaser pages. No fancy control panels, just a place to store data and have it seen by the internet.

 

[Gene Moore]

My web page from the mid-90's is still up ( http://chaseday.com), although it has not been updated in 5 years. The HTML is old and the program designed for management is long outdated the visitors have fallen from 70,000 to a few hundred. With respect to written chase accounts, how could anyone from the early years top modern armored vehicles rolling into the tornado with video cameras live. I do have an account where we were inside the bear cage less than 100 yards from a tornado in 1977...yawn, right. Additionally most of the images although sharp and colorful on the original slide film are marginal at best compared to modern digital. The main reason is we had to scan the slides or prints and the resulting quality was always substandard. For true quality only profession drum scanners did a really good job. They were impossible to buy ($40,000) and difficult to afford scan by scan. Thus my $1500 scanner was marginal at best. I have thoughts of rebuilding the site but I've said this before, time will tell. Other sites are still out there like Chuck Doswell's; it's not flamboyant, but it does a great job of telling the story. Also back then there was no pressure to get every storm whether tornadic or not. As for the sites dying off, there are quite a few reasons for that. First, many chasers went from website to blog. Remember how blogs were the rage that quickly died out when people discovered the time commitment involved. Second, people just moved on from chasing. Only a handful remain from the 70's and not many more from the mid 80's. Back then there was no illusion that we could make big money off chasing. People moved on to professional careers that offered a steady paycheck to include retirement and health benefits. Others got married, had children and became chained down to mortgage payments and a new BMW every year. When it comes to family your son won't care if you're a storm chaser... all he will remember is you missed his baseball or soccer games. In 1995 while Jim Leonard was photographing the monster Allison wedge I was watching my son get his first little league baseball hit. That said, I still chased but juggling both job and family was always a challenge. My long term average still remains in the neighborhood of 10 per year with a high of 35 in 2004 and a low of two in 1988. Ten per year, seems absurdly low, but I've chased for 45 years and I've photographed a tornado every year since 1973. For now I just enjoy being out on the plains every spring and I hope I can keep it up a while longer.

 

[Ben Holcomb]

Remember how blogs were the rage that quickly died out when people discovered the time commitment involved.

haha this made me laugh pretty hard. Blogs are a pain to update and keep an audience, and why do so with social media out there? Social media allows us to push a notification of lazy-length to 100s if not 1000s of followers. Blogs require some effort by the viewer to visit your blog.

New CMS (content management systems) out there make updating webpages easier. No need to install software, you edit a page directly from your web browser. Things are searchable and search engine friendly. The time commitment to copy/paste into a CMS is daunting, however.

 

[Adam Lucio]

It is a shame to see the website go. I am still a huge fan of websites and chase logs. I spend a good deal of time putting mine together, and really enjoy reading others so I am always checking the ones I know exist. It is a bit to maintain though, and I often fall behind. The way technology changes so fast, you almost always have to change the look of your site to keep up with the trends. The big one these days is things have to be easily viewed on a mobile device or tablet. Fortunately many themes for publishing sites like wordpress already have this built in, so there is little to do on your end.

I plan to keep my website going for a long time. If anything the less people that do it, the more visible my stuff will become.

It probably also has to do with todays ADHD generation, they just want to showcase their latest, greatest and move on. Thats sad in my opinion, to me it seems like they dont care about their work to give it the full respect it deserves. I have just enough old timer in me to appreciate the slower, more detailed approach and I wish more people did.

 

[Skip Talbot]

It would be nice if we could ask the people whose sites have disappeared, but I have a feeling they've disappeared from Stormtrack as well. Maybe a few are hanging around on Facebook. I think you guys summed up most of the reasons though and they probably all revolve around people have moved on from their old websites.

I wish we could archive this content somehow, but of course we'd run into copyright issues. Perhaps the Reports threads could become better integrated chase logs housed on the site. If you browse through the old Reports threads they're mainly just collections of dead links and broken images. That's why I really value projects like @Blake W. Naftel's Storm Chasing Anthology. We need a historian to go in and preserve this content because the internet is only the world's short term memory.

 

[Skip Talbot]

My long term average still remains in the neighborhood of 10 per year with a high of 35 in 2004 and a low of two in 1988. Ten per year, seems absurdly low, but I've chased for 45 years and I've photographed a tornado every year since 1973.

@Gene Moore, you're making the rest of us look real bad!

 

[Andrew Pritchard]

I think websites become too cumbersome to maintain and people have moved on to social media. It's unfortunate.

It's definitely this. I don't go back into the 90s, but I had a bunch of stuff from the early 2000s that I don't even know where to find anymore. My own damn stuff. Lost my first website that I maintained from 2000-2006 when geocities went away and took everything with it. And for the last decade I've said to myself "I really oughtta bring that stuff back online" and just never do. Started a new website in 2007 and just went from there. I started out updating that one pretty frequently but started growing tired of it - so I started a blog where I could post forecasts/write-ups/other photography thoughts more frequently and then more or less stopped doing that, too. So I revamped my site again to be pretty static, only updating the photos/video in the gallery several times a year. I still have a blog that I say I am going to start writing in frequently, but I'll believe that when I see it. What does it take, 21 days to build a habit? Well, I'll start when the temperature reaches double digits.

Way off on a tangent now - but I assume this is the case for several others. Websites come and go for whatever reason, and many likely just haven't taken the time to create a more modern archive for that older classic stuff. I've noticed a lot of it missing as well, but certainly haven't done anything to remedy the issue on my end.

 

[Andy Wehrle]

Good to hear from Gene M., his site was one of my favorites about 10-15 years ago and I was starting to wonder if he was still active as a chaser.

Skip T. and Shane A. are among the few chasers who continue to update their sites with detailed chase logs, and I for one appreciate that. I always look forward to reading about new chases from them.

From 2004-2007 I maintained my own website, but in September of 2007 the hosting service was hacked and destroyed. Part of my site was a database of every high risk outlook day the SPC and its predecessors had ever issued (that I knew about) with a collection of links to information about what happened that day, including accounts by chasers who were on the event. It was already getting hard to keep up with the link rot (archive.org had started to come in really handy, but even it didn't archive everything). Probably 80% of all the pages I had links to would be gone by today.

Edit: Couldn't help but chuckle at how many of us near-charter members from 2004 are now classified as "noob."

 

[Shane Adams]

I was wondering if anyobody would ever notice (and more to the point, miss) the mass exodus of detailed chaser websites/accounts. I saw this coming a long time ago, when blogs and then social media took over. It seemed all anyone was excited about or interested in sharing was their latest thing, kinda like top 40 radio; everyone wanted to share/see just whatever the "current hit" was from a given chaser. I look at websites and detailed chase accounts as appreciating not just entire albums, but entire catalogues from chasers.

Everybody does accounts on the high risk outbreak type days. Those get boring after a few. I like to see when a chaser scored an obscure tornado on a day nobody remembers. The stuff few others see is the most interesting, not because "I got the exclusive $$$!!!" but rather because it showcases true talent, being able to glean fruit from a less-than-stellar setup. That's what I like the most.

As for my website, I've always just done it for myself. I was never interested in trying to purposely build and maintain an audience; people are fickle and generally ADHD. They tend to discover and forget quickly, and the idea that I should try and base my happiness/success on their whim seemed like suicide. If people like what I'm doing, that's cool, because it means they're into what I'm doing anyway, whether anyone discovered it or not. Those are what I call "true" fans, meaning they like what you produce despite the fact it wasn't produced for them. These chasers today that gear everything towards snagging a demographic, those aren't fans so much as sheep. They'll keep coming around as long as you constantly feed them. The moment you stop for a minute, they move on to whoever's still throwing out the feed. I've never been interested in gathering that flock, because empty numbers don't mean anything. I like real numbers, regardless how low they may be.

I've recently begun to scale down the look of my site, because as mentioned, maintaining it is burdensome. I enjoy the new, simpler look. My already-dinosaur site is getting an even more old-school revamp haha. I appreciate the people who have always followed it and commented, with words of praise or even simple encouragement. I may not gear anything specifically for them, but the fact they keep coming around does mean a lot to me. I don't know what the future holds, but as long as I'm still alive and kicking, I'll keep the website going.

 

[Dan Robinson]

@Gene Moore thanks for chiming in. I visit your site several times a year and always end up spending a lot of time looking at it. That's the thing I miss about all of the ones that are gone now. Even if they haven't been updated in years, I always enjoy going back and looking at those old accounts and images.

I'll admit that putting together a chase log is an effort. It takes me a couple of hours to do a proper log with images. But I've always personally considered it as a vital part of the chasing experience. If I don't preserve the journey in some way so that I and others can enjoy it later, the original experience fades into insignificance. I mean, it's hard to find many accounts today of Mulvane. *Mulvane*! The online memory of such an incredible tornado is only being kept alive by a handful of sites. The same goes for many others. Seeing a tornado is a treasure, a privilege - I don't want some of those most memorable times of my life to be lost. Either in my own memory or for others.

I'm hoping that ST's resurgence will re-spark some of that passion in the community. Who knows, maybe we can work something out to host some small chaser "sites" right here.

 

[Steve Miller]

Websites are easy as ever to build and maintain. Anyone interested but not well versed in creating websites really should look into SquareSpace or Wix. The mindset that social media is the end-all is ignorant. We already see how FB treats distribution of OUR content to OUR followers. Twitter isn't far behind that process. Put your pics, thoughts, credentials on a website or blog (or here on ST) and share to social from there, otherwise you're throwing away your content.

 

[Ben Holcomb]

I personally really enjoy writing chase accounts and putting up videos and pictures from the chase and including a little map. Like Dan said, it usually takes me a couple hours to do each one, but there's only 2 or 3 days I have yet to write text for and they are last years most memorable days (April 27/28) and I've been lazy about it.

One thing that really helped me was using Drupal and setting up a content type for chases. It's now extremely easy for me to add a chase to my site using this content type.



And it all populates into http://www.benholcomb.com/chases/ with each case labeled by date in YYYYMMDD format ie http://www.benholcomb.com/chases/20130520

 

[Brett Roberts]

Great thread, Dan. I agree wholeheartedly. It's disappointing to know that there are probably many great storms and tornadoes chasers photographed and videoed in the distant past that will be lost forever, simply because they grew disinterested or busy and no one archived their content.

That's why I'm very happy to see the WxLibrary feature on Stormtrack, which I think everyone should take notice of and try to contribute to. It might even be good to reach out to website/blog owners with good content from old events and ask their permission to add content here. I've long thought about trying to deploy a "chase day Wiki" or something similar, and this is basically a realization of that idea.

Is there any chance we could take it one step further and store photos and other content locally, here on the WxLibrary pages, with the owners' permission? I imagine there would be some legal concerns, and perhaps that's why the admins have chosen not to do that so far. I just worry that the "collection of links to off-site content" structure does nothing to actually preserve the content for the future.

 

[Jeff Duda]

Nobody appreciates a good, wholesome weather analysis and forecast discussion anymore. People are also lazy and don't want to be made to read anything.

It's just
"GET ME TO THE TORNADO SO I CAN MAKE BANK OR GET ON TEEVEE!!! I couldn't care less what set of events transpire to get me there, and I don't have time to waste reading forecasts. SPC/TWC/NWS, my phone based radar app with its specialized storm tracker algorithm that tells me where to be and when to be there to see the tornado that I paid $10 for and my fast, fuel efficient, hailguarded/armored/tanked vehicle are all I need for that."

Who forecasts anymore anyway?

Who reads anymore for that matter?

Chasers can't be bothered to "learn" and "study" to be "successful". That's not the way the world works anymore.