I guess I saw this one coming – Kentucky is one of the hardest hit areas by the recent ice storm that swept over more than a dozen states and took out power to millions of homes across the country.

My brother went out and did some ice skating yesterday near Rogers, Ark and snapped this photo. He said this happened after some melting occurred, so you can only imagine how much weight this canopy was holding.

We just completed the addition of a new nowcasting area on stormchase.com. Visitors can now look over the Convective Outlooks along with the text, view up-to-date Doppler radar from sites all over Tornado Alley as well as retrieve live surface observations and IR satellite imagery. All course this information can be found on The Storm Prediction Center’s website and other NOAA websites, but its kind of convienent to have it all on a single page with an easy layout.

Just about everything between central Texas to Maine has been effected by severe winter weather over the past 48-hours and system seems to not be letting up as it continues to bring sleet, snow and heavy ice to the Ozark and Ohio Valley regions.

Storm spotters serve as the eyes and ears to warning meteorologist at the National Weather Service. Each year, various weather forecast offices hold training seminars that are free to the public for the purposes of providing enough training to help those who are interested in volunteering as storm spotters identify storm structure and understand safe practices while storm spotting.

I’m pleased to announce the long anticipated launch of the all new StormChase.com (at least long anticipated by me). StormChase.com is a work still in development and as the content grows the site itself will likely undergo some major overhauls. This blog however will likely be the most updated part of the website and I’ve invited several friends to blog here as well.