Finger on the Weather

Crisp nights, warm days — autumn has dawned in classic fashion around the region.

I love it.

Yet I actually heard someone complaining about the weather last week on a warm sunny day, and it wasn’t a person on one of those tornado-chasing tours that swarm the Midwest in the spring and early summer. Frankly, I felt bad for them if they couldn’t find pleasure in sunny skies and temperatures in the low 80s.

Some may consider this steady diet of sunshine and highs in the 70s and 80s dull, since we’ve had a couple of weeks of it. But I’m relishing it for more than one reason. The first is obvious – it’s simply gorgeous weather. The second is that Kansas weather is so often a yo-yo of extremes, so for a consistent pattern to settle in is noteworthy. When that pattern is this beautiful, it’s even better.

So other folks may fuss and fret, but I’m just going to enjoy it.

The Discovery Channel will feature another Wichita resident in its broadcast of the show “Planet Earth” at 7 p.m. today: Jim Reed, a severe weather photographer and storm chaser.

Reed told me he’ll be talking about severe weather in cut-ins that follow commercial breaks in the rebroadcast of the BBC series.

The National Weather Service now warns that isolated thunderstorms are possible in the region, and some of the storms could produce dime-sized hail and winds of up to 50 miles an hour.

The storms will be widely scattered, forecasters say – but don’t be surprised if something fires up.

Last Final Friday, I went to take a look at an exhibit featuring the landscape and weather photographs of Katherine Bay, a Mulvane native who now calls Wichita home. The Eagle first wrote about Katherine back in 2002, when she gained national attention for being a teenage storm chaser.

Since then, she has traveled tens of thousands of miles documenting tornadoes, hurricanes and other forms of severe weather. She’s worked with National Geographic, Twentieth Century Fox and numerous national television networks.

But she tells me her most popular photograph is one she shot right here in Wichita, in the back yard of a condominium near 21st and Ridge.

It’s a photograph of twin lightning bolts taken earlier this year. She captured it during “four hours of constantly taking pictures,” she told me. “Four hours. I’m out there with a cable connected to my hand
that goes to the camera and every five seconds taking a picture.”

She went through 32 gigs of memory in her photo card that night. That’s “quite a few shots,” she said with a chuckle.

Most of them didn’t have a thing on them. She didn’t realize she’d captured the twin bolts until she was going through the images some time later.

“People seem to love them,” she said.

While she was given the nickname “Tornado Girl” a few years ago, she confessed they aren’t her favorite weather phenomenon to photograph.

“People see tornadoes all the time now. Everybody shoots tornadoes now…well, if I see a tornado I’m going to shoot a tornado…but I like the structure of the storms better than I like the tornado.

“The lightning is probably one of the hardest things to shoot and to get a really good shot of…but it’s also my favorite to shoot because it is the most challenging. You have to work at it to get it.

“I do find it to be the most rewarding when you shoot all day and you get tired and you don’t look at the images for weeks and you finally go back and you find that one shot you didn’t have any clue you even took.”

More of her photographs can be seen on her Web site, www.katherinebay.com.