Thanks for taking the time to come in here an post, Erin -- pretty brave thing to do, considering the din. It's understandable that you're miffed that you've been labeled a moron and that comments have come up about your appearance. One action can never define who we are as a person, and so one label following one action isn't fair. And obviously, it doesn't matter what you look like or what your gender is when it comes to something like this.
Your report was wrong and the pictures that you posted, even when seen by storm chasers that weren't there (I was there) support the idea that you don't really know enough about storm attributes to be reliably reporting things to the NWS. I'd go so far as to say that you should remain extra conservative when chasing out there (i.e., not getting too close to the storms), as confusing those rain feet with a wedge suggests that you don't really understand storm structure well enough to keep yourself out of harm's way. Of course, that's your personal choice and it's no biz of mine how you do or don't chase, just try to stay safe out there. From personal experience, I've found the most dangerous thing I can do as a chaser is overestimate my skill and knowledge at chasing.
A couple of words of advice regarding your reply: I have found that, generally, posting a CV and listing every smart book you've ever read is not the best rhetorical method for laying out your case for who you are to other people. While it's nice that you've read Proust and are attending a college only a step below ivy league, it's not really relevant to this specific situation. It's certainly relevant to the accusation that you are somehow a moron -- but lets be honest, people who say things like that generally aren't swayed by logical lists of contradictory information. And since (in America, at least) the expectation of modesty is a powerful rhetorical tool, explaining to people how smart you are (even if it's really true) only creates a situation where your audience is more likely to latch onto how much you apparently think of yourself instead of what you're actually trying to say.
(It is, BTW, a good idea to be modest about yourself.)
The other thing I'd suggest is to be careful with the image that you portray to the world on Facebook. Your privacy settings are such that I can see quite a bit of info about you and browse through many of your pictures of yourself, and I am not "friended" or connected to you in any way. It's up to each person to decide how they want to be seen by their peers, but many of your publicly available pictures present a fairly non-professional and arguably sexually charged image of yourself (by western standards). This may come back to bite you, unless that's the image you want to portray. (But your reply in this thread strongly suggests that it's not.) If it's annoying as hell when people make comments about how you look in a string bikini, why post tagged pictures of yourself posing provocatively in a string bikini publicly on the internet? Does not compute.
At any rate, I'm only me and can't speak for everyone on Stormtrack, but I'd encourage you to stick around. Read, post, and keep learning. And ignore the jerks. (Literally, use Stormtrack's ignore feature. The jerks will be pretty obvious to you as you click around.) Glad you posted here; took a lot of moxie.
). I did take a shot at her in my report thread, didn't call her any names, just made reference to her bad report and for that I am sorry. My respect for her (not that that means anything to anyone else or maybe even her) just sky-rocketed for coming here and defending herself. I encourage you to make more reports, we all get confused at times. Don't let anyone discourage you.
