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.

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.

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.

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.