Hey everyone! My name's Tui, and I'm actually an operational meteorologist across the Pacific... Seeing as I'm posting on this forum, my interest in weather clearly carries outside of just being a purely professional interest! My main interest is, wait for it... convective weather! My weather interest mainly developed out of my aviation passion (I learned to fly and got my PPL at high school). Outside of those, my other interests include photography (goes well with weather!) and music.
Storm chasing is something I've wanted to do for a wee while now, and we've got a former storm chaser at work (who was the person encouraging me to join up here). We have our own form of exciting weather here; we had a frontal passage last week and the winds peaked at a mean of around 40kts - on the higher side but not outlandish for us, but it's not quite the same as the TS's of the great plains.
I'm planning on having a try at chasing next year, so I'll be looking to find out as much as I can over the coming months. I'm used to forecasting but... this is another climate and hemisphere! So I'm gonna be reading up as much as I can (already scouring some of the journals for some of the meteorology behind supercells and the likes). Obviously part of the fun of the challenge is the actual forecasting side of things, directly seeing the consequences of my decisions. And even if I don't see a tornado (which is the ultimate goal), simply seeing TS's on the scale of the Midwest is enough! (Where I'm from, we average maybe 2 days that have lightning a year...)
