Welcome to my photography collection! I have been photographing storms since 2017, and have photographed many of the Midwest's biggest severe weather events over the past several years. This page is a collection of my favorite shots and recent stories.
As a first-year research assistant, I served as a support meteorologist for the month-long TORUS-LItE field campaign in summer 2023. TORUS-LItE was a multi-institutional field campaign that deployed mobile radars, UAS, and other instruments to study supercells. I assisted with weather briefings and mobile mesonet operations.
MITTEN-CI aimed to study the interaction of lake breeze boundaries in western Michigan with conditionally favorable deep convective environments. I served as the lead meteorologist for two weeks of the month-long MITTEN-CI campaign duration. This involved preparing weather briefings, coordinating with project PIs, and managing daily mobile mesonet operations.
SCALES-UHI took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the first week of September 2024. It primarily utilized UAS from a number of universities to study the urban heat island effect in Tulsa. As a lead meteorologist, I oversaw site setup, hourly UAS profiling, and periodic weather balloon launches.
From May 19-27, I traveled over 5000 miles seeking the strongest storms and greatest photography opportunities. I covered 10 states, from Nebraska to Indiana and Colorado to Texas.
Multiple dusty tornadoes spawned beneath a powerful supercell as it seemed to ingest vorticity off of a quasi- stationary dryline. The strongest tornado intensified from barely dust devil status gradually to a long-lived EF-2 tornado.
Beginning in Iowa, over 5000 miles were covered across 10 states over the course of 9 days.
Weak upper level shear, strong low-level shear, and strong instability along an outflow boundary combined to support a discrete supercell with a strong RFD and rapidly evolving mesocyclone. Each time the storm seemed to be finished, a new cycle would build a full mesocyclone in minutes.
A slow moving cold front and streamwise hodographs resulted in multiple photogenic supercells that "unzipped" along the front throughout the evening, producing tornadoes with each new storm.
One of the region's largest tornado outbreaks produced this mile-wide EF-3 as well a handful of tornadoes near Lincoln, Nebraska.
A long discrete supercell twisted across the Nebraska Sandhills for at least 6 hours, producing mainly large hail. I captured it with timelapse and a wide angle lens at its most photogenic moment as the mesocyclone filled the sky.
A compact and ill-timed trough set the stage for a widespread tornado outbreak across the Central US. This tornado was the strongest of over a hundred tornadoes, rated EF-4.
A morning MCS left behind a NW-SE oriented outflow boundary that, when combined with an approaching shortwave and peak evapotranspiration season, fostered a relatively expected local tornado outbreak across northern Iowa. We chased this tornado for nearly 20 minutes as it slowly wandered through rural farmland.
May 26 is a day remembered by most as a disaster for storm chasers, with most ending the day chasing a failed updraft in Dodge, City Kansas. We almost met the same fate but decided last minute to chase a young supercell north of the warm front in northern Kansas. Once we arrived, the supercell latched to the warm front, grew rapidly, and produced multiple tornadoes.