John Homenuk

Two Week Warning

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You know that tingly feeling you get when you’re about to start something really exciting? Like right before a big sports game, or directly before a surprise party, or when you see the waiter walking toward your table with food? Today is a little bit like that.

In all seriousness, the excitement is starting to build. We’re exactly two weeks away from the start of our storm chasing adventure, which will begin in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25th, 2018. We fly in to Minneapolis in the early morning directly out of Kennedy Airport in New York City. It’s going to be a really exciting day. I’ll be bringing along a super-awesome chase partner for this storm chasing trip (it will be her first). You’ll find out more about her later.

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John Homenuk

Gravel & Grace

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It looked like a bomb had gone off.

The clouds bubbled over the top of themselves like boiling water in a way-too-small pot, signifying the intensity of what was really happening within them. Below the boiling clouds, the structure ebbed and flowed like a river, and even below that, it spun and rotated like a spinning top which was curling toward the ground like a tentacle.

It was a supercell, the most powerful type of thunderstorm on Earth, and it was alive.

The storm itself was massive, sprawling across the entire horizon, its updraft shooting some 60,000 feet straight above my head. Somewhere underneath the base of it, ravaging winds were producing widespread damage; very large hail stones were falling and pounding the ground, powerful wind gusts were ripping siding off homes, and somewhere within the mass of clouds a tornado was tearing up the dirt.

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John Homenuk

Storm Chase 2018: You have to start somewhere

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In 2017, I drove my soft top convertible into Nebraska to storm chase for the first time in my life. I had moved to Minneapolis a few months before, so this was only a natural decision for me to make. Driving a soft top convertible around tornadic supercells isn’t exactly advice i’d be giving anyone else, but it was an amazing experience for me – and it is suffice to say that I have been itching to get back out there.

I don’t claim to be any sort of expert in chasing storms – 2017 was my first crack at this. Since my first chase, I have been lucky enough to meet and interact with many folks who are extremely knowledgeable, and I am working each day to apply my meteorological ability and to learn more about how to chase these storms. This year, I will be storm chasing for over a week. I am lucky enough to be bringing a DSLR camera with me, and recording video in 4k resolution. I’ll have the opportunity to produce video and photos that I hope will be extremely rewarding – and more importantly, I will have the opportunity to chase supercells for several days and document it all; a dream of mine since I was just a kid.

I’ll be chasing from May 25th to June 3rd , and in the next series of blog posts I’ll do my best to outline my research and thought process in determining where to set up “base camp” and how I think the week (and season) will progress.

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