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Okay, time to get people caught up in the amazing wonders that is the life of Mike Umscheid and Underthemeso.com.
1. Career move. For those who didn’t already know, I was selected Lead Forecaster here at Dodge City, which is a pretty good promotion (responsibility wise and, of course, $$ wise). What this basically means is that I will be here in Dodge City for the foreseeable future. The ultimate goal of mine is to become a Science and Operations Officer at some point, but this is a 5-10 year time frame goal.
2. SLS Conference and Greensburg. I recently attended my first AMS Severe Local Storms Conference in Savannah, GA. This was an excellent conference with an opportunity to learn quite a bit from the research community. There is a lot of numerical modeling/simulation studies going on right now. Wow. Everything from simulation of observed supercells on 1 km grids to simulating corner flow regions of tornadoes on 10 to 50 m grids to very interesting simulations of tornado "debris swirl" patterns. With increased computing technology, simulations of supercells and tornadoes will continue to become more complex with better physics, microphysical processes, etc.
I had been working feverishly on a conference paper with Les Lemon over the past couple of months on the "extremes" of the Greensburg storm. This paper is online on the AMS conference website. It’s a 19-page paper that is really not all that far off from being ready for peer-reviewed publication submission. Here is the URL… http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/141811.pdf
3. Photography. Several Sundays back (the beginning of October), I gave a presentation on storm chasing and photography to the Consortium of College and University Media Centers annual conference which just so happened to be held in Lawrence, KS this year. I gave about an hour presentation/slide show to the group. I was surprised by the number of folks in the audience who had actually seen a tornado — more than half the room rose their hands. At any rate, it was great to share my photography with a bunch of people who had probably never seen these kinds of storms even in picture before. Later on that week, I gave a shorter version of this presentation at the Central Kansas Photography Club in Great
Bend. I met some more great people here, and I want to thank Jim Glynn for sharing with me all his incredible wildlife images as well as buying me dinner and the invitation to speak.
4. Speaking of Photography… I haven’t done a whole lot of "field work" recently. I did do a sunrise/early morning shoot at Big Basin the morning of October 24. Interspersed in this post are a couple of images from that shoot. The herd of bison that roam Big Basin Preserve offered some close-up shots as they straddled the rocky road on my way out. The late afternoon/evening of Sat, Nov. 1 I went out to Quivira, but had disappointing results. Crane numbers are not all that high (yet), and no Whoopers were to be found, despite there being sightings apparently earlier in the week prompting the signs throughout the refuge and notice on the QNWR website. I don’t even have any images worth uploading I had such poor luck. I wasn’t really in the "spirit" of landscape photography that evening either given the absence of clouds to help accentuate landscapes. Perhaps this upcoming Saturday, Sunday, or Monday morning I’ll head out there for a morning shoot.
