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

[Andrew Pritchard]

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.

Will throw another plug for Wix out there. I have *never* prided myself on my web design skills, but the most recent version of my site was extremely stress free and is easy as ever to update.

http://www.skydrama.net/

Unintentional website plug - really just want to show that something that to an outsider might seem like I put a bit of thought or effort into was really pretty easy to do. I may work on incorporating the blog to the main website (Wix has a great blog feature, too) but for now I've just linked it back to wordpress.

 

[Drew Terril]

I have to admit that one of my biggest regrets from my early days chasing was lack of chase accounts. Granted, I didn't have the camera equipment to add visual to it, but I would definitely remember some of those chases better if I had taken the time to write out what transpired those days. I definitely don't have the catches that most of the more active on here have, but I wish for my own sake that I had taken the time to put something like that together.

That's definitely something that will take effort on my part to correct going forward, but it's doable. If I don't start now, I'll only regret it in the future.

 

[Nick Nolte]

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

Interesting, I wrote a plugin for wordpress to track chase stats and attach them to a chase log. It's quite a classic example of spaghetti code, but I might clean it up sometime and release it lol

It populates the data at http://www.nicknoltewx.com/stats/ as well as the chase stats you see on each chase entry in the blog which has how many tornadoes/hail/wind at the top, then at the bottom of each shows where and when I intercepted, who I ran into, etc...

Also wrote another plugin for the live chase tracker on my site. People at work and family love to follow me where I am, so I've spent the last couple weekends rewriting that so it updates automatically every minute or two with my current location, shows my gps track for the day, pulls the base reflectivity from the nearest radar site to me and overlays it on google maps along with warnings. I'm excited to see how it works this season. http://www.nicknoltewx.com/livetracker/

 

[Joey Ketcham]

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. .

From the early 2000's until a few years back I had the website The Kansas Storm Chaser, kschaser.com which no longer exists. A couple of reasons why I no longer have a site; first is technology is rapidly changing. When I first started web designing, it was simply HTML and that's what I learned. Later on you had PHP and other scripting languages come along and I really had no time, or desire, to learn. Especially when tablets and mobile devices took over, I had no interest in creating a site that was mobile device friendly. The other part, I got burnt out on storm chasing and each year found myself chasing less and less until the point I wasn't chasing at all. I storm chased passionately for 14 years, got to observe mother nature's incredible power time and time again, I felt like there was nothing more for me to do and I wanted to move on to other things. I still get out when severe weather passes through on a local level, but the days of me chasing in Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle are done with. Because of that, I had nothing more to offer or share on my old site.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

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

I agree with Ben. Why build (and pay) for a website when you can make a free page on FB. I own websites, pay for a dedicated server and have more than 10 domain names myself but I've loved web design stuff since the 90s. I get into it. However, I enjoy programming-be it something as simple as HTML or something as advanced as PHP and MySQL. Doing all that is like learning a language, if you got the time and passion, you'll do good - if not, you'll hate it really quickly.

As for storm chasing sites, I've run a few in my time but personal ones for me are hard to keep up with. Though these past few years, I've exceptionally taken up blogging so maybe maintaining a personal chase blog wouldn't be as hard as it was before... I may make one again one of these days. I got carried away with all my sites, so I have been trying to cut down as of lately

 

[Adam Lucio]

Interesting, I wrote a plugin for wordpress to track chase stats and attach them to a chase log. It's quite a classic example of spaghetti code, but I might clean it up sometime and release it lol

I'm a stat junkie, so I would love to have a plugin that did that!

 

[Brad Goddard]

Nick, That live tracker is something I have been interested in for sometime. It would be great to share with family/friends. I think if you got that cleaned up to a point you would find many would have the same interest

 

[Greg Higgins]

From a different perspective but also along the lines of Gene Moore's post, there are probably many folks that chased as far back as the late 70's when there wasn't the technology that we have today to post pictures and logs. I know that many of my pictures (mostly slides in the day) are either boxed up or I gave them to the local NWS office (I gave Al Moller many of mine). And as Gene pointed out, chasing back then was very different. It was largely based on the forecast the day before and then driving to a local NWSO or television station and hoping they had time to share some information that you could use to plan your day. Then technology happened! Another drawback was some of the snide remarks that were made by the newer generation of chasers about the quality of the pictures (film vs. digital) and the "ignorance" of our forecasting abilities back then. It came down to having time to scanning pictures, rewriting logs (if you could still read them!) and notes into a digital format, keeping up a website, family obligations, money and deciding how much BS one could take over what we (older chasers) considered was a good chase. I enjoy Shane's outlook as I too share his ideology of "I'm out there for me, not the fame or fortune". I'm glad to see that Dan and others have recognized that this information is disappearing from the internet and making an effort to collect and archive as much as possible. THANKS!

 

[Dan Robinson]

@Joey Ketcham Regarding code complexity, these days it's actually getting easier/simpler. Mainly because of mobile and that "content" is king. A simple one-column html page with text is perfectly fine, even desirable, especially today as that already adapts to mobile very well. Complex designs and layouts are a relic of the late 90s and 2000s, as they are harder to maintain and ensure proper display across all devices. Even I have gone one-column on my own site for the mobile issue alone.

For the sites that have lapsed, if there is a backup of that site somewhere, just bringing back what was there originally would be a great start. If you don't have a backup, chances are archive.org still has everything. That work's already been done, after all, it's just a matter of uploading the old files. I may start a thread for Q&A on web site and coding tips if anyone would find that kind of thing helpful.

 

[Gene Moore]

I've always embraced technology in chasing and certainly don't fault modern chasers for computer model/radar chasing. To my knowledge I was the first chaser to carry a computer into the field starting with a modem and TI 700 terminal for alpha/numeric data in the late 70's. That was followed by a small desktop I built, a fax machine then a laptop. That said, I do believe the latest decade of chasers are missing out if they don't learn to read clouds, although I see evidence they are learning these skills. It's important for two reasons, first knowing what the storm will do before the radar (precipitation) tells you it's happening. And second, just for the pleasure of knowing what's going on. Inflow banding, and most of the convective updraft/wall cloud structure don't show up on radar until precipitation forms or gets entrained. Granted, many media chasers don't care about this approach since it only distracts from the goal of getting debris footage... and I get that, same storm, different reasons for being there. I never heard the "snide remarks" about film vs digital, but old Kodachrome will make a great print or digital image if scanned well enough. The biggest problem with film was the speed, 64 ISO; now I shoot under the wall cloud scenes at 640 ISO, 3 stops faster, big difference. To put this in speed terms a still camera at 1/15 sec shot now becomes 1/125 sec, that's huge. I lost so may tornadoes because the scene was just too dark to get a proper image if not setup on a tripod. And 8mm film cameras, wow they were horrible, but that's another subject.

 

[Blake Naftel]

@Skip Talbot - Preserving the digital era of storm chasing, in my opinion, is a very challenging task, one that I have not yet embarked on. The downside in chronicling the later half of historical storm chasing culture is digital technology, all of which can be/or is quite easily discarded with the click of a mouse. The analog era, while material in varying formats is immense, cumbersome, and existing in various condition, is far easier to chronicle and preserve due to it's actual physical state. One literally needs to made the call to pitch the tape, film, or document in the trash/or recycle bin, which does take some effort I've found (actually serving as a fortunate benefit to the Storm Chasing Anthology). Of course analog technology deteriorates over time depending on means of storage, thus no medium (analog or digital; in celluloid, magnetic, or file-based form) is truly secure (short of vinyl LP records, those will outlast us all).

Creating a website or list-server 20 years ago was a new, exciting mode of communication which broke boundaries, especially for those interested in experiencing/documenting severe weather, myself included. Other responses have identified the key causes for these disappearing moments in time from the era between 1995-2009 -- technology, change of lifestyle, shift of priorities, lack of storm chasing, saturation of multimedia, dwindling attention spans, etc. Perhaps the new resurgence of interest in StormTrack online may actually bring about a renaissance of intercept accounts? Perhaps not? Time will tell. Good thread!

 

[Matt Phelps]

I started writing chase logs and maintaining a website, but I forgot about it and didn't put as much into it as I need to. I'll definitely be redesigning it and updating it soon, however. www.StormIntercept.com

Gene, insane that you've documented a tornado that many years in a row. I'm on year 5 in a row, 2015 should be 6...

 

[Matt Phelps]

I've also recently began to print off a lot of my photos to put in albums (what a concept). Almost all of my storm chasing pictures are on Facebook, what a depressing thought. Here's a picture of my album:

 

[Marcus Diaz]

Wow Matt...I didn't think about printing a photo album. That's actually a very cool idea in this day in age. Its good just in case something happens and you lose ALL your media.

 

[Matt Phelps]

Wow Matt...I didn't think about printing a photo album. That's actually a very cool idea in this day in age. Its good just in case something happens and you lose ALL your media.

Right? It's more interesting, and makes for good conversation if you have company over. More people should do it. I have a lot more to print off, but it's a start.