2021 March 1 post

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

It's that time of year again! We've made it through another winter into the season of warming temperatures, green vegetation and thunderstorms.

After missing the entire spring tornado season last year due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, I am especially looking forward to this year where quarantines and travel bans don't appear to be on the table across the Plains and Midwest. I am also expecting to be fully vaccinated by early April, further decreasing the virus concerns for peak storm season. That being said, I will still be employing a strict personal protocol of essentially living out of my vehicle while on the road. I've already been successful in proving the proof-of-concept of zero-contact travel during my winter weather trip to Texas, and plan to keep those in practice through the spring. I also have no-contact procedures ready for contingencies such as vehicle breakdowns. Of course, should the virus experience a resurgence with the re-issuance of travel restrictions this spring, I will abide by them the same way I did last year - even if it means missing out on opportunities (last year, the pandemic restrictions resulted in my first zero-tornado year since 2009).

As for my other spring season traditions that involved long-range forecast exercises for Great Plains expeditions, I don't have plans to start the longstanding chase season sub-blog this year. Truth be told, I wrote that forecasting blog sub-series specifically for fellow storm chaser readers, and I am not sure I have any audience for that type of content these days. After my unpopular heavy taking-to-task of chasers breaking travel restrictions last March essentially resulted in me being blackballed from the storm chasing community, I'm not sure I have many friends and readers left in that demographic. So, moving forward, I might comment here and there on setups I think are interesting, but otherwise there will be no 2021 spring storm season blog series. I do appreciate the readers I still have left, so I will continue the trip reports, videos and photos as before.

As for photo and video goals this year, I will be continuing focusing on high-speed lightning video as a primary subject, including shooting at much higher framerates than the [email protected] I've been using the past 2 years. I'm pretty excited to see how that will turn out, so as always, stay tuned!