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

[John Farley]

FWIW, I think it is a loss when these old Websites disappear, and wish there were some way for ST to bring them back or archive them. Facebook is easy, but its algorithms mean that some people see it and some don't. There is no real searchable archive like ST reports threads, so past events are quickly lost. I still have all my reports on the Web going back to 1996. Even today, my reports are nothing fancy, just HTML, but they are there on my Web site and linked from ST reports threads so that if you are interested in a particular day, you can find it. If there were some way to bring back some of the Web pages that have been lost and archive them on ST, I'd be all for it, though I suspect that would be a near-impossible task.

 

[Lanny Dean]

@Lanny Dean that would suck to lose that. I'm going to really work on getting my chase logs up and going. I have some on my site right now, but it will be nice to have some up for chases not with the tours.

It did suck! Opened the passanger side to while the drivers side was opned.....bad deal

 

[Shane Adams]

Stumbled upon this thread last week and it inspired me to "bring back" every detailed chase log I still have. These have all been live for as long as they've been in existence, but when I scaled down my site a few years back (replacing many of the old, detailed logs with videos) I unlinked them all. Unfortunately, all the summaries from the days I made videos for are gone, and I'll probably never redo them. So, for the bored, the curious, or those who simply enjoy chase history, I offer my detailed chase logs: http://www.passiontwist.com/archives.htm

 

[John Moore]

My site is still up at http://tinyvital.com/Weather/StormChase/index.htm. But, I put it up mostly as a place to keep the few photos I shot.

And, I have only damage photos there from chasing in the '60s in Kansas - the Topeka '66 F-5 that I watched from the KANU-FM transmitter site in Lawrence. The next day we rented a plane and flew over and my brother took the damage pic..

I also have a time lapse from 1992 looking straight up into a "cinnamon swirl" meso just before it dropped an F1 or so tornado right next to me - in Paradise Valley, AZ.

But, the web site has been there 22 years (I think) with various things other than chasing on there also.

 

[B. Dean Berry]

This gives me a bit of an idea that goes off on a tangent from the original post.

I've always been a bit of a gearhead when it comes to cars. I know one of the strange things that attracted me to storm chasing in the first place was the intensely awesome mobile setups that chasers would use. It seems to me that the intricacy and skill used in constructing chase vehicles has deteriorated over the years. Having seen some chasers' vehicles that they (proudly) display on social media, before nuking my Facebook account, made me outright depressed. The run a barbell-shaped graph, from huge amounts of "That's a 1988 Buick Skylark with your iPhone taped to the dashboard with Velcro and a $70 amber mini-bar", to a narrow strip of heavily modified and expertly outfitted vehicles in the middle, to huge amounts of "That's a vinyl-wrapped 2017 Prius with your iPhone expertly mounted on a $300 4-axis stabilizer on the windshield".

Where'd the fun go? Where'd the unabashed tech nerdiness go? The chase rigs have gone from the stuff of weather-nerd daydreams to being either garbage-tier duct-tape-and-lightbar monstrosities or soulless corporate sterile factory interiors with a smartphone, with very little in between.

To better document this, my particular little wing of interest, I'll be starting a thread down in equipment, simply called The Car Show. Please feel free all, to drop by and post pictures of your mobile builds, current or past.

Even if it's duct-tape-and-lightbars.

Even if it's soulless corporate sterile factory interior with a smartphone.

I'll be digging up photos of all of my old ones as well.

One day, people. One day sooner than any of us thinks, 2018 will be 1996.

 

[James Hammett]

I've started to leverage the Internet Archive ( archive.org ) to help ensure what's available today will remain available in the future. They don't just passively crawl and archive websites...they'll store all kinds of multimedia including videos, images, etc for posterity on demand. I've added their bookmarklet to my Chrome bookmarks toolbar and use it to immediately archive important pages. For example NWS tornado surveys have a way of routinely disappearing. So I just bring up the page, hit the bookmarklet button, and instantly get a permalink to content that will continue to be available into the future. Here's a blog post describing how to get content archived: https://blog.archive.org/2017/01/25/see-something-save-something/

The remaining concern then is how to retain links to the content that's already been/being archived at archive.org. If you find a broken link to a storm chasing website in your bookmarks, don't trash it...look it up on archive.org and save the link to the archived content. Then share the archive link with the community so we can start a repository of links to archived content.

 

[JamesCaruso]

This gives me a bit of an idea that goes off on a tangent from the original post.

I've always been a bit of a gearhead when it comes to cars. I know one of the strange things that attracted me to storm chasing in the first place was the intensely awesome mobile setups that chasers would use. It seems to me that the intricacy and skill used in constructing chase vehicles has deteriorated over the years. Having seen some chasers' vehicles that they (proudly) display on social media, before nuking my Facebook account, made me outright depressed. The run a barbell-shaped graph, from huge amounts of "That's a 1988 Buick Skylark with your iPhone taped to the dashboard with Velcro and a $70 amber mini-bar", to a narrow strip of heavily modified and expertly outfitted vehicles in the middle, to huge amounts of "That's a vinyl-wrapped 2017 Prius with your iPhone expertly mounted on a $300 4-axis stabilizer on the windshield".

Where'd the fun go? Where'd the unabashed tech nerdiness go? The chase rigs have gone from the stuff of weather-nerd daydreams to being either garbage-tier duct-tape-and-lightbar monstrosities or soulless corporate sterile factory interiors with a smartphone, with very little in between.

To better document this, my particular little wing of interest, I'll be starting a thread down in equipment, simply called The Car Show. Please feel free all, to drop by and post pictures of your mobile builds, current or past.

Even if it's duct-tape-and-lightbars.

Even if it's soulless corporate sterile factory interior with a smartphone.

I'll be digging up photos of all of my old ones as well.

One day, people. One day sooner than any of us thinks, 2018 will be 1996.

I've had the same nostalgic thoughts. I am a chase vacationer that just flies in and rents an SUV each time, but I used to fantasize about having a chase vehicle when I retire and have the time to drive out to the Plains and chase the whole season; or maybe I would even have a small place out there where I could leave the vehicle between seasons. Nothing crazy with light bars or stickers or anything, just something good for the dirt roads and properly outfitted with video, computer, etc. in the interior. But in recent years I've come to realize there isn't that much need anymore, when you can realistically chase with only an iPad. So that dream has basically died, but not completely, because it still would be nice to have a dedicated chase vehicle that is more rugged than what I would want to drive every day, and that I wouldn't be worried about getting hail damage or chips and dings from dirt/gravel roads.

MODS, feel free to move this to Dean's "Car Show" thread when he starts it.


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[JamesCaruso]

MODS - sorry, just realized that Dean already started the thread referenced above, I reposted there but am unable to delete my post above. My apologies for leaving you a mess to clean up [emoji17]


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