Last year I had the opportunity to attend the launch of space shuttle mission STS-123, which was a night launch and that was particularly exciting for me. We arrived on the site around 4 p.m. in the afternoon even though the launch wasn’t scheduled for liftoff for another 11 hours – each minute that went by was filled with the anticipation of what my resulting photos would look like.

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.

When four friends, including two NFL players decided to head out into the Gulf of Mexico for a fishing trip on the morning of Saturday February 28th, their fate was probably already sealed.

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!

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005 the world watched in shock and amazement as local, state and federal officials were heavily criticized for not responding in a timely manner to the initial response, or the aid that would follow in the months and years to come.

I’m not going to name the offender but one of my friends just emailed me with an update to his blog and after a few seconds of at least trying to read it – I had to close the page.

So, why don’t I read you’re blog?

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.

Georgia’s insurance and fire safety commissioner on Monday increased the damage estimate from last …

I have a problem with the wording “Never try to outrun a tornado. Motorist should abandon their vehicles and seek a sturdy shelter or lay in a ditch or other low-lying area.” I understand the underlying reason for this statement is that most people are not familiar with severe storms and they may not know what they are driving into – thus, it is best just to tell them to get out of their cars and jump into a ditch or low-lying area.

FaceBook is a popular social media website, and websites can’t chase storms – but FaceBook might just own hundreds of storm chasers photographs. If you judge chasers by the amount of photos they have collected – FaceBook would have to be at the top of the list.

Baron Services has released an update to the Mobile Threat Net system. The new version includes these updates/fixes:

Before you go and update your XM Weather subscription, you might want to keep on eye on the techie news today concerning Sirius/XM and their possibly bankruptcy filing.

If satellite radio died in the woods would anyone be around to hear it? The answer is going to have to wait!

There is a very slight chance for tornadoes today across parts of the South and along the Gulf Coast. A 55-65 knot westernly flow in the 700-500 mb level combined with steep mid-level lapse rates and increasing moisture will likely create severe storms anywhere from extreme East Texas to points E/NE later today and through tonight. Most likely threats will be severe hail, strong straight line winds, but even though this appears to be an MCS event, any storms that develop will have a small potential for tornadoes.