As most know by now, I do a lot of volunteer work in the ocean activism community when I’m not storm chasing in Tornado Alley. I was in Otsuchi Japan (Iwate Prefecture) on March 11th, 2011 monitoring the slaughter of Dall’s porpoises for Ric O’Barry’s Save Japan Dolphins and standing just a few feet from the water on a man made pier in the middle of Otsuchi harbor when the M9.0 earthquake hit.

Our new storm chasing tour schedule for 2011 is available at StormTours.com.

The preliminary data for Saturday’s tornado that hit Yazoo City, Mississippi is now available. No doubt this thing was a monster.

The first tornado of the decade has been issued. To our knowledge at the current time, an actual tornado hasn’t been confirmed – but the warning went out. So what is the lucky area that received it? Texas…Oklahoma?

We just received a high priority phone call at the StormChase.com forecasting center from the North Pole. It was Santa’s lead elf meteorologist, Dr. Bouncy Sugar Socks. Poor little guy was freaking out!! It seems that Santa is very worried about the Christmas Eve forecast for supercells and possible tornadoes over parts of Oklahoma and Texas, as well as the strong turbulence over the United States due to a strong upper jet.

Dr. Rick Toracinta was my chase partner on several great storm chasing occasions and I was extremely fortunate to befriend him. Rick was a rising star in his research field of Polar Meteorology at the Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University.

The GOES-14 (GOES-O) satellite was launched on 27 June 2009, and is undergoing its Post Launch Test. The first calibrated full disk visible image (above) was received by the SSEC Data Center beginning at 17:30 UTC on 27 July 2009.

Oklahoma University and the National Weather Center cut the ceremonial ribbon on the first NWS quality Dual-Polarization radar this week.

Storm Chasing Handbook
If you’re reading this blog on stormchase.com, then there is a 100% …

Reservations are now being accepted for our 2010 Storm Chasing Tours. We began taking reservations only 20 minutes ago (at midnight) and have already confirmed 2 reservations!

Greensburg is for sale! Not the town that was almost completely destroyed when an EF-5 tornado hit it on May 4th, 2007, but Greensburg the race horse. And half of the money that Greensburg brings at auction will be given to the town of the same name to help them with their continued recovery efforts.

We’re excited tonight – and tired! The first flash map widgets specifically for The Spotter Network (www.spotternetwork.org) are finally ready for our first release!

We’re going to be burning the midnight oil over the weekend to try and complete a lot of the work that still needs to be done before we launch our “testing phase” of our new flash maps and we’d like your help – if you would like to help us test out our new map on your website and/or blog, please send me an email (brian at stormchase dot com) and let me know about it – I’d love to have your help.

I’m excited to announce (finally) a project that myself and a few other programmers have been working on for awhile now – a flash based map that automatically refreshes without having to reload the entire web page and updates your position, as well as a radar image overlaid on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth street atlas!

Since it’s founding on January 15th, 2001 Wikipedia.com has grown to become the world’s largest encyclopedia. And of course the world’s largest encyclopedia has a lot of content related to meteorology and severe weather, but I had an idea – a Wikipedia clone that is focused exclusively on meteorology and severe weather. It’s an idea that some people might find objectionable, but I think not.