Greetings spuds!

My name is Shane and I’m joining the greasy team of mesoholics this chasing season.  I hail out of Hamilton, ON and have finished a long stretch of 8 years of post secondary studies in both meteorology and urban forestry.  I get the best of both worlds on this grand adventure because if there isn’t a storm to look at, there’s flora and insectia unknown to study along the roadways.  But if you’re looking for weather lingo/jargon, etc., from my blog posts, you’re pretty much out of luck.  Why?  In the last two or three years since I graduated from met school at York, I’ve been living away from the hardcore weather nerd scene under a rock, or perhaps, up a tree!  Maybe one day along the road I’ll be bored enough to attempt to describe thunderstorm and tornado formation with arboriculture terminology and leave you all stumped! (credit to A. KC for that one)

So today we set sail from north of Toronto around 10:00 am in the morning and ended our day in Matrinsville, IA 11 hours later.  Quite a transition in many respects.  I’ll get my tree crap out of the way by saying we went from swelling buds to trees of the same species nearly fully leafed-out.  Flowers from Malus spp., Prunus spp., Cercis canadensis and even the Robinia pseudoacacia’s had there flowers showing off to me by the end of today.  There were a few others that I couldn’t identify from the front seat of our trailblazer and i’m sure it will only get worse for me as we head further south.

So once we were across the border in Port Huron, we headed south for Indiana.  Along the way we managed to get a couple of what the others in my group deem “Accidental Intercepts”, ie thunderstorms that found us along the way to our planned destination.  We do keep a strong eye for any dangerous developments that we would need to steer clear of but this time we just found a couple cells good for the beginners such as myself.  Lots of rain washing down with some noticeable outflow wind as we first got in.  We found some interesting cloud structures that rarely make themselves appear in southern Ontario and bright and sunny skies on the other side.  All in all, a solid first day.

And lastly, if you’re in to eating roadkill, there’s enough along hwy US-24 to feed a whole village of you for several days.  Poor lil’ buggers.

Until next time,

=>Shane