Tour Director's Field Report

I want to thank everyone who traveled with us during 2009. It was often a long and exhausting journey, but there were several outstanding days and great payoffs. Every tour saw severe storms and supercells and our team intercepted several tornadoes during 2009, but not all were as photogenic as others. 2009 proved to be a better year for photogenic supercells than 2008 did, but it did come with fewer tornadoes.  The season was well documented by The Weather Channel in their coverage of the Vortex-2 project, which itself only intercepted a single tornado (in Wyoming) after an exhausting month of storm chasing.

I'm currently hard at work on the 2010 season promotions and traveling to various promotional events as needed.  We're looking forward to a great season next year - perhaps one of the best in terms of tour sizes. We've just got so many projects happening right now that maintaining the chase logs is proving to be quite difficult. I personally like "detailed" chase logs and they are just as much for my enjoyment of being able to go back and read them, as they are for your enjoyment of learning about our adventures!  However, between all the other projects that I'm currently involved in, I don't have the time to transcribe all my hand-written notes and process the hundreds of new images that were captured from the 2009 season - I will get them posted, I just don't know when.

If you're not familiar with some of the other projects that I'm involved in - please visit www.StormChase.com for more information.  StormChase.com is one of the fastest growing severe weather/storm chasing websites on the Internet.  I've also created a "Widget" that works with The Spotter Network for other storm chasers to use on their own websites, blogs and social networking profiles and I have had an overwhelming response to the widget since it's intitial release, so we're working on some improvements at the moment in hopes of having Version 2.0 ready before the 2010 storm chasing season is gets underway.

On top of that, I'm also a working photographer and commercial video producer.  That alone is enough to keep 10 people busy on most days. So please bare with us while we work to get all the new updates posted - and please don't hesitate to contact us with your questions and/or comments.  We look forward to chasing with you in 2010 and beyond!

Very truly,

Brian Barnes