WHY CHASE AFTER STORMS? - A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE BACK TO WEATHER-BLOG MENU New! Fine Art Prints & digital images for sale- Welsh Weather & Dyfi Valley landscapes Slide-Library - Click HERE I've always held a deep fascination with the natural world "out there". When I was a kid I had one schoolteacher who enjoyed dragging me up in front of the class to sneeringly point out my failings, in that I was obviously too "far too busy looking at rocks, flowers and butterflies" to go to football matches like "normal lads did". Very constructive. If that was what turned him on, I guess it was down to his particular intellect. Anyway, I'm glad I ignored him! For many people, thunderstorms vary in quality from unnerving to terrifying! I can remember some pretty hairy moments myself: hiding behind the sofa as a ten-year old when lightning split a tree in two in a nearby field; running in blind panic down a glacier in the Otztal Alps in 1980 when C-G lightning was hitting all around every second like an electrical artillery bombardment; and feeling incredibly vulnerable on a small angling boat a few miles out in Cardigan Bay in a storm in which the VHF radio masts started to make a demented buzzing noise like a thousand bees! Yes - caught in the wrong place and wrong time, storms are both terrifying and dangerous. So why actually go out seeking them? No wonder some of my mates find my hobby a source of amusement (to put it politely)! Terrifying and dangerous, yes - but I would add another adjective to the list. Magnificent. The art of the successful storm-chaser is to watch what is going on from a safe vantage-point, close but not too close, somewhere where the beautiful cloud-structures are revealed as they develop, constantly changing, works of natural art marching without opposition across the landscape. There seems to be a culture present in today's society within which the natural world around us is held in denial. The poem written years ago, which begins with "What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare" seems to be more appropriate a commentary on society now than when it was written. Thus the plots of TV soap operas today predominate in vast swathes of our culture over the changes in seasons. When did you last hear somebody come into the pub and say they'd seen the first celandines in flower? That sort of thing belongs to the culture within which the now elderly members of our society existed, before television took over. That's what they tell me, anyway, and I am inclined to believe them. Well it's not quite that bad, but you get days when you feel that it is. My view is that denial of nature is the culture that leads to shock horror news headlines when the natural world occasionally turns on the heat to remind us that we are part of it for all our detachment. Denial of nature goes hand-in-hand with terms like "freak storm". A drought is when your lawn goes brown - a sanitised, safe version of crop failure. Snow is a nuisance because it slows up the traffic and makes you late for work. And so on. We storm-chasers and weather photographers are a small but growing community here in the UK. We're people who don't talk vaguely about the weather (you don't hear the term "nice day" very often!), but understand and forecast the workings of our climate and get out there to witness and record its fury, its tranquility, its ever-changing beauty. We, like other dedicated naturalists, are the exact opposite of the denial culture. We make time to "stand and stare", whatever the other pressures of modern life. And I, for one, have felt much more a part of my natural surroundings as a consequence. Still, although this interest in severe weather is growing, I can't quite see the point when someone drains their pint glass and says they have to go because it's time for the 1200z GFS* runs! *GFS runs are the batches of atmospheric data, available online and updated every 6 hours, produced by the Global Forecasting System. They are studied meticulously in the run-ups to storm events. We make our own weather forecasts using these and other data sources - see my links page. PHOTOGRAPHY I got into landscape photography back in the late 1980s when I got my first "proper" camera. It didn't take long to realise that the prevailing weather was what often really "made" a good landscape photo. In the early to mid-1990s I lived on a small hill-farm to the SE of Machynlleth, with an unbroken view N and E across the hills of Mid-Wales. The mid-90s included some good thundery summers and many an evening was spent sat outside watching the lightning play about the hilltops after dark. I don't know when it happened but at some point during this time I realised I was diving for my camera every time there were storms about. The early results were not that rewarding but by 2000 I had started browsing around the numerous chaser sites from the USA and elsewere. In time I started to appreciate the tactics required to up the odds of good results: the importance of local and synoptic forecasting, the structure of storms and above all the importance of finding clear slots where the visibility permitted good photography. The more you understand storms, it seemed, the better your chances of results, whether chasing a tornadic supercell in Kansas or a fast-moving single cell in Ceredigion! The realisation of the importance of studying the data bore fruit at last in August 2000 when, on one of my earlier chases, I ran straight into a photogenic funnel-cloud and from then on I was hooked! BACK TO WEATHER-BLOG MENU New! Fine Art Prints & digital images for sale- Welsh Weather & Dyfi Valley landscapes Slide-Library - Click HERE