Photographing my first tornado, and how it changed my life.

Since I was a little girl, I was fascinated with the transient movement of clouds. I spent many afternoons laying in the grass in our backyard, or sitting among the highest branches of our tree, and watching the clouds swirl and drift across the sky.

I wondered what caused them to metamorphose into such magnificent shapes and patterns. When storms would form, I wondered what caused them to seemingly explode upwards into the sky like an atomic bomb; it seemed impossible that something so immense, towering tens of thousands of feet into our atmosphere, could suddenly explode into existence before me, only to shrivel and dissipate away seemingly moments later.

So I did the only thing an inquiring and fascinated young mind could do; I made it my life's ambition to study and pursue them. These storms, these powerful atmospheric forces, were so entrancing, it became an obsession to observe and understand them. I needed to how and why they form, evolve and transform the skies the way that they do.

Bare with me, as I'm about to get a little technical with the meteorology talk for just a moment.

May 9th, 2015 in Colorado and western Kansas began initially with a Moderate Risk for severe storms, as issued by the Storm Prediction Center in its Day 1 convective outlook. A shortwave trough was expected to track eastward across the southern Rockies throughout the day, with associated lee cyclogenesis in east/southeastern Colorado. Favorable upslope flow, modest instability, surface dewpoints in the low 50s Fahrenheit, steep lapse rates and a strong 75kt mid-level jet were all signaling a potent atmosphere that was primed for severe storm development.

Late that morning, I set off on the open road with a fellow meteorologist and storm chaser. We targeted southwestern Kansas as our initial staging point where we'd anticipated storms would develop, but ended up backtracking into Colorado as soon as we saw cumulus clouds begin to bubble up in that area on visible satellite imagery.

We arrived in the town of Lamar, Colorado and quickly raced northward toward a towering white updraft of a supercell, and a lowering wall cloud, which is the first indicator that a tornado may be forming soon.

Right before our eyes, white tendrils of condensation began to spiral and swirl, and reach toward the ground..

And then, there it was. My fist tornado! A brilliant white tornado against a deep blue background.

And it was perfect.

I'll never forget this moment. It was the moment I knew.

This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

I stood in that field barely able to focus through my camera's viewfinder on what I was shooting, because my eyes were filling with tears. This scene was so overwhelmingly beautiful.

Everything I had dreamed of since I was a little girl obsessively watching the movie Twister a thousand times over had led to this moment. All of my childhood years watching summer storms in my parents' garage, when we'd pull out camping chairs and just drink it all in, were igniting a small, but growing flame.

That flame would soon become a roaring fire.

I still remember experiencing my first tornado warning as a child. Rather than feeling fear most kids would feel, or a need to run to shelter, I felt an overwhelming urge to see the storm that was heading our way. I was only 11 or 12 years old, but even then, my parents knew. "This girl loves the weather", they would say.

And now, over 20 years later, I am living out my dream as a meteorologist that chases and photographs storms for a living. I've worked tirelessly over the last 10 years to combine my passions for photography and weather into a viable career.

These tornadoes that occurred on May 9th, 2015 served as the catalyst that would catapult my storm chasing journey into the stratosphere.

Since then, my storm photos and videos have been aired on national television networks such as The Weather Channel, AccuWeather, ABC, CBS, FOX Weather, CNN, and more; I have worked as a field correspondent for WeatherNationTV covering major weather events across the USA, I've been interviewed for local and national news stories about my storm chasing career by 9News Denver, and the Denver7 channel, and I've sold my storm imagery to numerous international commercial clients.

Now, I'm a full time NFT photographer sharing my art with the world via the blockchain and Web3 and it feels so surreal to be apart of this incredible, cutting edge digital art world.

This is my life passion, and I am so immensely fortunate to be able to fulfill it.

"If you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life". - Marc Anthony

~ Jess

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