"Pecos" Hank Schyma's Newest Book Is Now Available

[Randy Zipser]

A shout out to Hank Schyma, whose newest book, Storm: Chasing Nature's Wildest Weather, is now available on Amazon.com and at retail bookstores. At thirty-six bucks, it's a bit pricey, but very well worth the cost! It has a picturesque, sturdy hard-bound cover and is filled with Hank's beautiful photography and lots of illustrations and graphics to go along with each chapter of text. It has 256 pages and would make an excellent "coffee table" book for any storm-chaser's collection. Check it out on Amazon.

 

[Randy Jennings]

My copy arrived yesterday and I echo Randy's praise.

 

[Randy Zipser]

I had a chance this evening (10/29) to look through and do some reading in Hank's book, since it came earlier today. It is very well done and clearly explains many phenomena that experienced storm chasers have seen and documented, but without meteorological jargon and mathematical equations, which the general-public reader will greatly appreciate. I really enjoyed the section on TLEs, and would love to photograph this phenomena (I had heard of their existence only many years after I started chasing severe storms in the Great Plains in the early 1970s, but have never witnessed a TLE). I enjoyed the many wonderful photographic plates throughout the book, too.

My only "critical" comment would be that Hank should have included in the "Chasing For Science" section a bit more discussion about how scientific researchers, meteorologists and engineers analyze tornado wind speeds and air-motion, particularly in the near-environment boundary layer (debris cloud), which supercomputer modelling methods cannot "see" in unique detail. Specifically, I would have liked to have seen a paragraph or two comparing pros-and-cons of the three main ways in which the debris cloud environment is sampled: direct measurements using flight drones; mobile Doppler radar sampling; and terrestrial photogrammetry of video imagery. Oh, well, I guess you can't think of everything...

Overall, well done, Hank! If you love storms and related phenomena or chase them, this is a great book to own in your home library!