• After witnessing the continued decrease of involvement in the SpotterNetwork staff in serving SN members with troubleshooting issues recently, I have unilaterally decided to terminate the relationship between SpotterNetwork's support and Stormtrack. I have witnessed multiple users unable to receive support weeks after initiating help threads on the forum. I find this lack of response from SpotterNetwork officials disappointing and a failure to hold up their end of the agreement that was made years ago, before I took over management of this site. In my opinion, having Stormtrack users sit and wait for so long to receive help on SpotterNetwork issues on the Stormtrack forums reflects poorly not only on SpotterNetwork, but on Stormtrack and (by association) me as well. Since the issue has not been satisfactorily addressed, I no longer wish for the Stormtrack forum to be associated with SpotterNetwork.

    I apologize to those who continue to have issues with the service and continue to see their issues left unaddressed. Please understand that the connection between ST and SN was put in place long before I had any say over it. But now that I am the "captain of this ship," it is within my right (nay, duty) to make adjustments as I see necessary. Ending this relationship is such an adjustment.

    For those who continue to need help, I recommend navigating a web browswer to SpotterNetwork's About page, and seeking the individuals listed on that page for all further inquiries about SpotterNetwork.

    From this moment forward, the SpotterNetwork sub-forum has been hidden/deleted and there will be no assurance that any SpotterNetwork issues brought up in any of Stormtrack's other sub-forums will be addressed. Do not rely on Stormtrack for help with SpotterNetwork issues.

    Sincerely, Jeff D.

If any of you win the lottery...

Joined
Dec 13, 2003
Messages
723
Location
Wellston, Oklahoma
If any of you get rich, maybe you can get some of these toys to use on a chase:

http://www.photosonics.com/index.htm

Photo-Sonics Inc.

We specialize in high speed digital cameras, high speed film cameras, optical tracking systems, motion analysis software, head-up display cameras, film scanners and other specialized photo-optical instrumentation products.

This item would be particularly nice for filming a tornado:

Range_Camera.jpg


Range-Camera-recorder-low.jpg


Recently high-speed digital imaging technology and computer technology have advanced to the point where long recording of high-speed digital images is possible. The Photo-Sonics DRC655 has been developed to take advantage of these technologies. It can image at 500 frames per second for 15 minutes or more.
 
That would be great for lightning video. 500fps is good enough to resolve some small-scale propagation behaviors with lightning, particularly stepped leaders. Standard 30fps can resolve one or two frames of the stepped leader before the first return stroke (more if the lightning is far away and coming out of the clouds), but 500fps would get some great stepped leader sequences.

There have been some nice 1000fps shots of lightning taken with high-speed film cameras, but the cost of film and vast amounts of wasted film needed to get the shot make this difficult:

http://wsx.lanl.gov/images/lightzap.gif
http://wsx.lanl.gov/images/lightning.mpg
(just a note - the video above has been edited to show a forward-reverse sequence of the same clip, there isn't actually a stepped leader that 'retracts' back up as the clip shows)

Maybe I should look into getting a grant to pick up one of these :)
 
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