Posted by admin on August 23, 2010
Well it’s been a busy month around our house, a new geothermal heating and cooling system was installed just over two weeks ago and so far I am smiling from ear to ear. Both our boys are back in school, Aaron started his senior year, hard to believe, it has gone by so fast…..Marching Band practice has started and we will soon be following the FZN Panther Pride Band around the state of Missouri. AJ is in 4th grade and I am starting to realize he has only one year of grade school after this year.
Onto weather! It has been HOT, both stations have recorded temperatures in the upper 90′s, and heat indexes around 120 degrees. We were dry for the first two weeks of August, since then we have received decent rainfall, the O’fallon station has recorded about 2-1/2 inches in the last 8 days. The St. Peters rain gauge has been fixed for now, seems some wasp found a way in, I wasn’t the one who discovered this….Luckily no one was harmed in fixing the station. We have had some small issues with power at the St. Peters location. The unit is run with a capacitor charged by a solar panel, if the capacitor goes dead it switches to a backup battery. We think the backup is weak and will be replacing it shortly.
I have been working on a page to document our geothermal installation and savings, it is located here, I will clean it up a bit and add more information as time allows.
Our site continues to grow, we had a big traffic day earlier this week with over 100 users in one day! Month to month this year I am seeing 15-25 percent increases in usage, thanks, and I appreciate everyone spreading word of our sites!
Filed under: Geothermal, Ofallon Weather, St. Louis Weather, St. Peters Weather
Tags: Geothermal, marching band, Ofallon Weather, St. Louis, St. Peters Weather, Storm Chasing
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Posted by admin on July 19, 2010
So since we backed out on our chase to Minnesota Saturday and the storms this morning took the energy away from what could have been a decent setup for MO/IL, I spent some time updating the website.
The archive page has long been a thorn in my side. It worked, but I didn’t like the way it looked. I found a nice script online that I really like. Until now each month I had to manually update the last months data and place a new link on the archive page, the same process occurred for the yearly archive listings. This really wasn’t a big deal, about 10 minutes each month, now it will all happen automatically.
Hopefully the data is easier to navigate and it should be updated within 2 hours at the beginning of a new month/year.
Here is the link: NOAA Reports
Filed under: Ofallon Weather, St. Peters Weather, Storm Chasing
Tags: Ofallon Weather, St. Louis, St. Peters Weather, Storm Spotter, Weather
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Posted by admin on July 2, 2010
Well I just uploaded the archive data for June to both sites. I was surprised to see that this June had an increase in cooling degree days of around 20% over last year. Hopefully this year will continue like last year, a warm June followed by below normal July and August.
The “official” storm chase season is over in the plains, but we won’t stop! If we have free time and severe weather is nearby we will try to chase or stream from our home. Sunday looks like a possible chase day, although it doesn’t look all that good for tornadoes. Monday is a bit to far out, but if the cold front continues it’s movement we could likely have some storms on Monday. What would a 4th of July weekend be without some thunder in the St. Louis area.
On a personal note, we are waiting for a geothermal heating and cooling system to be installed in our home. Hopefully this will happen within 3-6 weeks. I will be creating a page or two on the site to document the installation and energy savings that we will see from this system. I am anticipating atleast a $50.00 a month savings in our all electric home.
Have a happy and safe 4th of July!
Filed under: Ofallon Weather, St. Louis Weather, St. Peters Weather, Storm Chasing
Tags: Ofallon Weather, St. Peters Weather, Storm Chasing, Tornado
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Posted by admin on June 21, 2010
Wow! We drove just over 2200 miles over 3 days on this chase. We had another eventful outing, although we still have yet to observe a tornado. Our first day we left before 6 am, we were heading towards western Nebraska, we watched one storm that just couldn’t maintain itself. It did give us hope with a small wall cloud and a sky full of mammatus clouds before we left it. Thursday we headed to Minnesota, what a trip, trying to maneuver between storms, this happened because we were chasing a cell close to the coldfront, us and many other chasers missed the main line by about 50 miles. This only got more exciting as we continued to try and find a better storm. At one point we were sitting along a road with 5 confirmed tornadoes within 10 miles of our location……We did see damage from one tornado that hit less than 1 mile from where we were sitting. Once we removed ourselves from the situation it was decided it was a bit to extreme for us and we bailed out to Olive Garden then to our hotel for the night.
A more complete summary will be posted in the Storm Chase Reports page this week, pictures can be seen in the Photo Gallery.
Filed under: Storm Chasing, Video and Pictures
Tags: Storm Chasing, Streaming Video, Tornado, Video
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Posted by admin on June 13, 2010
Well, that was one of the worst storms I have experienced since moving to O’fallon in 1994. We recorded a peak gust of 56 mph, and a 15 second rain rate of 17.45 inches per hour. Our home did not receive any damage, although several homes/trees in our area did. I have picture posted in our photo gallery of storm damage from today. 6/13 damage pictures
Filed under: Ofallon Weather, Video and Pictures
Tags: Ofallon Weather, Storm Chasing, Storm Spotter
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Posted by admin on June 6, 2010
Well looks like we missed out on a great chase day Saturday in Illinois. We had some issues with servers at work so my two co-workers and I put in 9 hours on Saturday. I will be on vacation starting next Saturday, I am hoping for multiple chase days that week.
Tuesday is looking interesting for our area for Severe Weather, keep an eye/ear out as we get closer. The rest of the week looks to be turning very warm with highs over 90 as we approach the weekend.
On a sad note…..We lost several people in the storms Saturday, I would guess that most of them had no idea severe weather was in the area. If they did, they likely didn’t take action. A few minutes in the basement is well worth it.<rant off>
Filed under: Ofallon Weather, St. Louis Weather, St. Peters Weather, Storm Chasing
Tags: O'Fallon, Ofallon Weather, St. Louis, St. Peters Weather, Storm Chasing, Storm Spotter, Streaming Video, Weather
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Posted by admin on May 24, 2010
Aaron and I had another fun chase on Saturday. We had chose our initial point of South Central Nebraska, we drove straight past Kearney and then started heading north and further west. Our furthest point north was just into South Dakota on highway 83, we found a paved road that ran east, we really needed this to try and get in front of a tornado warned storm. We went about 8 miles east, through some small hail, then the road turned to gravel/mud, we drove another couple miles and had to turn around, the road was to dangerous.
We did watch the birth of several supercells, this after we had given up. We had just introduced ourselves to David Toner, another chaser from Springfield, MO. We had noticed him in our area on the spotter network map. We left to head back southeast when we noticed some clouds building to our north north west, we turned around back to US 83 to blast north. These storms went up quick, from nothing to hail/wall cloud producers within 30 minutes.
We feel like we had a successful day, the only thing missing would be a tornado. We have figured out that we are taking pictures/watching to much when these storms develop, we need to make sure and get in front of them at this time. Once we decided to move is when we realized the road network was not great, with many roads being unpaved. We did stream video for a short period of time, although once we were near the storms we were on a much slower connection and had to drop the video to 5 frames per second.
Pictures of the storms development can currently be viewed in our photo gallery, 5-22-2010 Nebraska Chase
Filed under: Storm Chasing, Video and Pictures
Tags: Storm Chasing, Storm Spotter, Streaming Video
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Posted by admin on May 21, 2010
Just when I started writing another weekend off it appears some life is coming to a possible Saturday Chase.
Currently looking to head to south central Nebraska, we can head that direction and tweak our destination while on the road.
As long as we can maintain internet, we will have live video and we will be in the chat room also. This area looks well covered by Verizon our data provider. We will likely be on the road around 7 am, with hopes of getting to our destination 1-3 hours before the storms start.
The Chase page link is the top link in the middle column on the homepage. Chase Page
Filed under: Storm Chasing, Video and Pictures
Tags: Storm Chasing, Streaming Video, Tornado
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Posted by admin on May 9, 2010
I have embedded a Google calendar into the blog. It is on a separate page with the link showing in the menu on the left side of the blog. Calendar Link
Everyone keep an eye out Monday night into Tuesday morning, we have the possibility of severe weather. Most likely large hail and wind, but one never knows. Tomorrow looks to be a rough day for Eastern Oklahoma and possibly SE Kansas as well as Western Missouri.
Filed under: Ofallon Weather, St. Louis Weather, St. Peters Weather, Storm Chasing, Video and Pictures
Tags: Hail, St. Louis, St. Peters Weather, Storm Chase Calendar, Storm Chasing, Storm Spotter, Streaming Video, Tornado
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Posted by admin on May 8, 2010
I totally missed this last month, the St. Peters weather station has now been operating for over 1 year! Things have been operating very nice. Special thanks to Andy, he host the station and computer at his house.
Well locally it has been quiet and getting a bit dry for spring with the O’fallon station down 3-4 inches of precipitation for the year so far. Next week is looking like some of this deficit could be made up with an extended period of unsettled weather.
This coming week starts a series of long weekends for me, I scheduled time off work for storm chasing, hopefully the weather permits. We have already tested the live video streaming as well as the chat room. Each weekend from now until the first full week of June is either 3 or 4 days, the second full week of June I am off the whole week. Keep an eye here or become a fan of our Facebook Page
Filed under: Ofallon Weather, St. Louis Weather, St. Peters Weather, Storm Chasing
Tags: Ofallon Weather, St. Louis Weather, St. Peters Weather, Storm Chasing, Video
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