FRACTAL - 4k StormLapse

The ingredient based explanation for supercell thunderstorms cites moisture, wind shear, instability and lift as the reasons for their formation. I prefer to focus on the big picture. Supercell thunderstorms are a manifestation of nature’s attempt to correct an extreme imbalance. The ever ongoing effort to reach equilibrium, or entropy, is what drives all of our weather, and the force with which the atmosphere tries to correct this imbalance is proportional to the gradient. In other words, the more extreme the imbalance, the more extreme the storm. This collection of timelapses was gathered over the last six years from Texas to North Dakota and everywhere in between. The project started out as wanting to be able to see the life-cycles of these storms, just for my own enjoyment and to increase my understanding of them. Over time, it morphed into an obsession with wanting to document as many photogenic supercells as I could, in as high a resolution as possible, as to be able to share with those who couldn’t see first-hand the majestic beauty that comes alive in the skies above America’s Great Plains every Spring. After more than 100,000 miles on the road and tens of thousands of shutter clicks later, this is the result. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed creating it. Keep an eye out for a much longer version of FRACTAL, hopefully on a much larger screen. If you have any ideas regarding distribution to that end or would like to license my work for your own project, please contact me. I love teaching people about storms and severe weather and how to safely document them. Feel free to email me if you have any interest in joining me for a chase. June is by far the best time to go out, as the storms are more photogenic and slow moving than any other month. I’m always open to any sort of work outside of storm season. Let’s create something! Chase on. ------------- “Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity, and little whirls have lesser whirls, and so on to viscosity.“ - Meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson (“Weather Prediction by Numerical Process.“ Cambrige University Press, 1922) This quote sums up perfectly what I’ve come to realize about weather and storms over the past 10 years of studying, forecasting and chasing them, and the part that I find most fascinating. On each scale level from synoptic-scale, which covers areas the size of multiple states, all the way down to micro-scale, which could be an area as small as your backyard, the fluid which we call air abides by the same universal physical laws of nature and thus acts in a very similar manner and patterns. A cold front, for example, is a phenomenon which is widely understood to mean a large scale line of advancing cold air, hundreds of miles long, along which supercell thunderstorms sometimes form. Within these smaller storm-scale environments, something called a rear-flank gust front forms on the southern end of the low pressure area of the mesocyclone, where the rain cooled air wraps around. This is effectively a storm’s cold front. The cool air is more dense than the warm air, and because of this, advances into the region of lower density, just like the larger cold front on which the storm formed. The stunning supercell storm structure we see is along these relatively small, storm-scale cold fronts. This is what forms the “hook“ on radar. Here, just as with the larger scale weather systems, the wedge of denser cool air at the surface meets the warm, moist, buoyant air in front of a storm, forcing it aloft and through the cap where the potential energy is realized. Given the right conditions, this development can be explosive. While Richardson’s quote is more regarding turbulence than thermodynamics, his theory from nearly 100 years ago that our atmosphere behaves as a fractal has turned out to be spot on. A “top down“ transfer of energy and behavior occurs, resulting in a Russian nesting doll of smaller scale systems that bear a striking resemblance to the larger. ------------ I would like to offer a special thanks to my good friend Kevin X Barth who helped me edit this together, and found some semblance of a story arc in many disparate pieces. Kevin is an amazingly talented and creative artist in his own right, having won an Emmy as the editor of the ESPN 30 for 30 film WHEN THE GARDEN WAS EDEN. Check out his website if you’re looking for an excellent editor or director for your project: A big thanks to Tom Lowe as well, without whom I would probably still be trying to figure out what an intervelometer is. Tom is the mastermind behind Timescapes, the revolutionary timelapse film from a few years ago. He was kind enough to share his wealth of knowledge, as well as some camera gear.