Steve Burre
EF0
Guys - no. Due respect, but don't do this. Don't lie, don't try to BS people. "I'm here to photograph the weather event" - that's it. Be honest, be forthright about who you are and what you're doing if you don't think it's wrong. The whole "BUT SCIENCE" and "I'M SAVING LIVES" business - everybody sees through these obvious impostures and they are frankly an insult to people's intelligence, law enforcement or no, and that's a big part of our hobby's PR problem.
If you really are spotting to report or you really are operating in support of some university or agency's scientific program, that's fine; but if not, please don't go carrying around some cheap consumer-grade "instrumentation" so that you can pretend to be a scientist when you're actually not. It's puerile.
I am not saying to lie...but 1) science is NOT the exclusive domain of some "government approved" university or agency, 2) scientific models are developed to explain observations of nature, 3) field observations help validate/invalidate scientific theories, etc...Who knows, perhaps some new/modified theory will be developed from the El Reno tornado with supporting video observations from the chasers who were there. As an example from another field, 75% of comet discoveries have come from amateurs.
I'm simply saying that should the government do something as insanely stupid as trying to ban storm chasing (other than regulations that have merit like amateurs not using marine radar causing interference with mobile Doppler, people flying remote planes around storms without FAA certification, etc..), then there will always be some way to go around that roadblock and be prepared with whatever story you want to tell the 'authorities' if necessary (like making observations on the possible correlations of rear flank downdraft/XYZ/tornadogenesis which is all open for exploration at the current time since there are still many things about tornado formation that are still a mystery) - but do not accept such unconstitutional impediments like sheep.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety - Benjamin Franklin
I would venture to guess that a number of people on this forum have probably set up various 'alias' email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. accounts - is not disclosing your full name on some of these sites "lying"? To me, it is common sense NOT to disclose a great deal of your personal information (as to why... take a look at the disclosures this past week of massive government data mining operations against *all* US citizens (OK - maybe not all, but anyone who makes a phone call), targeting of certain groups by the IRS, etc...).
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