(Transcript) Shear Review: The Chase Archive with Cameron Nixon

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[00:00:00] Kyle: Welcome back to Chaser Chat, everybody. This is Kyle Gillette, host of Shear Review. And Shear Review, again, is kind of a series of Chaser Chat where we investigate new research that’s being published in the field of meteorology. Specifically, we want to look at research that’s related to storm chasers, how storm chasers can better their chase based on new work being done in the community. But this episode’s gonna be a little bit different. We’re going to step outside of the box with this one just a little, because it’s not necessarily published research that we’re looking at now. This is going to be research for the chaser community, by the chaser community. And this one is a special, so with me today is the all powerful Cameron Nixon. So Cameron, we have a a new project that’s coming about here in the chaser community. And in this project, you’ve been teasing it on social media so far. I do think though, that there are probably some people still wondering what this is going to end up turning into. Folks today we’re going to be talking about Chase Archive, which is a a new project that’s been thrown around a little bit on Twitter or X. And there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Cameron, just tell us, what is Chase Archive?

[00:01:07] Cameron: So I think a lot of this started I can remember when I started amassing soundings just because that is what interested me at the time. Hodographs, Skew-T’s, and building a case list of interesting events or things that I found interesting or like famous cases. I just wanted to know what conditions created those events. And was it a little obsessive? Yeah, I’m different. But I think I, yeah, I just realized that I was building up this large list of things. And so eventually that morphed into the case archive on U. S. Tornadoes. I just wanted somewhere to put all these things because they weren’t really doing me any good on my own hard drive. Or that they weren’t doing the community any good. And I noticed once I put them on there people started passing them around and sharing them and ” Oh, maybe like this case coming up is really similar to that case back in 2010″ or what have you. And it served as a poor man’s analog system where people, yeah, I could compare past events to what they’re, they could be experiencing tomorrow or the next day. So what Chase Archive is then is our attempt to make this more of a community created archive. I remember back when, this was solely on U.S Tornadoes, people would, get a little frustrated at the end and be like, “Cameron, why didn’t you include this case?” They’re like, that was my favorite day. Why didn’t you put that one on there? I want to make everyone happy. So I first think that’s, a good way to make everyone feel involved and be able to contribute their objectively awesome cases because I simply do not have time to add all these. And then I was also inspired by groups like The Tornado Archive who have their, their whole map where you could search, just type in a year and you can get all the tornadoes from there. I was inspired by chasers, people like Skip Talbot who create their own little chase map. Yeah, I’ll tell you like, A lot, it seems like a lot of the OG chasers have their own kind of map that they’ve created from their own travels. And with, their everything from their tornado intercepts or supercells to busts, I have something like that too. It’s just like something us chasers just do. And I, same thing I feel like that kind of data could be immensely helpful to us. And I think it’s amazing that they have this on their website so we could look at. But I think it could even be more helpful to us as a community if we throw this all together. And that’s where I want to go with this.

[00:03:56] Kyle: I have a question for you then. How long has Cameron Nixon had this idea in the back of his head?

[00:04:02] Cameron: Honestly, it wasn’t exactly solely my idea either. I’m going to hit on Jim Tang here for a minute because he approached me at the Chaser Summit a couple of years ago with basically an idea to create a, an app that when you’re out in the field, when you’re spotting, all the pictures you take and your reports could be submitted to this app. Like Spotter Network, but a lot more geared toward like the chasing hobby. And at the end of the day, you could see everyone’s pictures, around the storm and where they were at the time who was chasing, whatever. Cameron I thought that was brilliant. I also think that just due to people’s monkey brains when they’re out there chasing, and this is not a, this is not a a slap at people, but it’s really hard to adopt an entirely new app when you’re out in such a stressful situation. So I don’t know really when this idea came to me. I think it was when Jim showed me, what he’s really capable of doing. Like just creating like web apps and stuff. So he’s been an integral part of this, but I think the whole idea of an after the fact, you sit down, got your SD card in your computer, Lightroom is open, you’re like, man, this was just such an awesome chase. And then you’re like, you know what, I should add this to the archive because I want other chasers to be able to have this data to be able to have the environmental conditions that created such an awesome chase. And then be able to use this in the future because I want people to be able to see the same storm that I did today kind of thing.

[00:05:37] Kyle: It’s a fascinating idea. And I think when people really start to be able to use this, it’s going to become more and more prevalent. And one of those things that really becomes useful, whether it’s the day of, or planning days out, or just a way to look back and compare and compare days, compare your chase days. So I think there’s a lot of use for this. One question: you mentioned you want people to be able to see this data. What is the data that people will be able to look at when they go back and look at a chase day on Chase Archive?

[00:06:12] Cameron: So what we’re imagining right now, and again, a lot of this is subject to people’s abilities, people’s time restraints. So I can’t really give you, unfortunately, when, like a time when all this is going to ultimately come to fruition. But the dream I have is to, you log in there’s a main page where you see all the chases from this year. And they’re not just tornadoes. They’re supercells. They’re LPs. They’re Haboobs out in Arizona. They’re hurricane intercepts. All of these niche things like lightning days. I want this to be able to satisfy any kind of chasing and, not only will people have access to stats from that day okay, how damaging was that tornado? What was it rated? How long was it? They’ll have access to photos and videos that people took from a variety of different angles. To remember that event by. And then at the end, there will be some component of environmental analysis with this. Basically, when we amass this many cases and we’re able to put labels on that, right? Like maybe wedge tornadoes or LP supercells versus HP supercells. I think there’s a lot of interesting things that we can come up with. We could start learning how to predict Okay, when is if you really like your drill bit tornadoes from LP supercells we can use past data to predict the environments that those are most favorable in. For me, I just moved down here, a couple years ago, and April rolls around and I’m gung ho. I’m ready to get out. There’s storms in the forecast, and every time I’m out, I’m just disappointed. Something happens that, it just makes it not a great chase. And I think Cameron with all this data, we can start to separate it okay, what are the environments of the truly good days versus the days that, you can skip for your mental health. And I think that’s a huge driving factor behind this for me is that I want to be able to be a little bit more selective in this process. As much as I say, I’m a perfectionist or whatever. I’ve still made a lot of bad calls recently.

[00:08:22] Kyle: I think one of the fascinating things about the ability to look at this through a chaser kind of perspective is now we’re not talking about hazards, we’re not talking about, okay the best hail producers the best tornado producers. We’re looking at this through what we are caring about in that moment is. What’s the structure like and I know this is something that you’ve looked at in the past. How well does the storm motion relate to the road network? How visible are the storms? Is it going to be grungy? Are we going to be looking at these barber pole LPs? Are we going to have this massive HP mess? And some of these things are important to operational severe forecasting, but others, not so much. Those are the things that we care about. So now this is the opportunity for us to really build a data set of all these different chases that we have. And that’s why, of course you need the good ones and the bad ones. So we know are different. But now we can really explicitly look into those things and investigate what- not necessarily what big severe weather days and small severe weather days look like- but what good chases look like in what bad chases look like.

[00:09:26] Cameron: Yeah, because very often as you probably know the best severe weather days may not be the best structured days.

[00:09:30] Kyle: Right absolutely.

[00:09:32] Cameron: And I think a lot of this reminds me… some of my mindset going in here is you know I’m a hobbyist and let’s think of other hobbies like sports for instance especially if you don’t play and you’re just like you’re geeking over the stats and like people’s like hit rates and like whatever you do. I’m not a sports person. But I think this could be really similar where like you could enter a chase day informed with a certain amount of information that will help you decide, okay, should I chase for one, is it going to be worth my time? What is people’s average hit rate on a chase like this? If it’s low, should probably sit this one out. And then ultimately we could develop actual guidance. I’m already ruminating over machine learning and stuff like that to help us target. And I know that sounds scary, but this is a hobby and I want to just play around with it a little bit.

[00:10:23] Kyle: And there, there’s always the question, you get two or three storms that go up and you have to sit there thinking, which one is it going to be? If you’ve got chasers on a day where you have those three and you’ve got someone who can provide the case for the Northern storm, some that provides case for the middle storm, some, now we can see what those three storms look like those environments nearby. And then maybe that helps us in that moment make the decision. I’m going to play the middle storm. I’m going to play the north storm or whatever the case is. So I think there’s a lot of ways that this can be useful in the moment. And then also leading up to that chase for chasers of all kinds, some people you want to be right up close and be breathing down the tornadoes neck, or you want to be standing far away, taking those structure shots. We have the ability to put in here and see what works and what doesn’t.

[00:11:10] Cameron: I agree. It’s, you can, you can refine your experience by what you want to chase, I think is the end game with this. And we could provide different products to you based on what you’re looking for on that day, if you’re looking for big HP hogs there we go. We got data for you. You’re looking for, it’s just your friendly little motherships. Yeah. We got that too.

[00:11:32] Kyle: Friendly little motherships. We were talking a lot about, improving our chase day. What about chaser safety? Might this contribute to the community? Will there be ways to improve our knowledge perhaps of what a storm motion might be like? Things that are related more to chasers than just severe weather in general. Do you think there’s safety benefits to this as well?

[00:11:54] Cameron: Yeah, absolutely. What we’re doing right now is, we’re refining the way we use tags to categorize chase events. When you throw a case in the archive, you could tag it as tornado, and you could also tag it as deviant. You can put some descriptors in there that are related to chaser safety and in the end, whatever algorithms we use to predict the next chase will be based off of some of those tags. So we can develop a like a forewarning system for dangerous chase days, understand what the sounding for that, those kinds of days typically look like. Maybe even what kind of cell configurations there are before days like that. And we’re also categorizing days that we’re not too kind for storm chasers. So anyone who uses this can literally just look up, chasers hit by tornado in the search bar and find all cases where chasers were hit by a tornado. I mean they wanted to do their own personal study on that and learn more about that, they could.

[00:12:56] Kyle: Absolutely and that’s I know something that you specifically and several others have been really trying to work on here in the last several years really building up that chaser safety is… it’s been a hot topic. People are liking to get closer these days. In some instances, maybe there’s just some poor judgment that happens in a high stress situation. That stuff happens. But how can we better prepare ourselves beforehand by looking at these past cases and then looking at what the forecast environment is maybe we can better plan to keep ourselves out of those situations. And so I think that, the safety aspect with this project is going to be huge as well.

[00:13:35] Cameron: I’m already like this… this sounds like something that I should include more in depth than this. I think we can go beyond just the tags.

[00:13:42] Kyle: Absolutely. And, being able to this is just totally off top of my head here, being able to provide you, how comfortable were you chasing this storm? Did you constantly feel like you were between the Bear’s Cage and between, the hail core and forward flank? Was it a very lazy chase, you just got to sit there and look? Those kinds of things too I think would also be useful for chasers.

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[00:14:47] Cameron: So I just want to say this in this podcast here, whoever’s listening, we want your feedback. I, if it’s not a secret anymore, Kyle also is roped into this and we want your feedback. If there’s something that sounds like something that you would like to measure, because we’re all about trying to measure your experience chasing, whether it be through like the photogenicness of your storm or through just how positive or negative or dangerous your experience was, we want to be able to include this in this project.

[00:15:18] Kyle: Yeah and, to bounce off that, it’s very important that we also have the bad chases, right? Everyone has that chase that they can think about. Oh man, the structure was awesome. The tornadoes were awesome. My execution was awesome. For me, that was just back on August 28th in North Dakota and South Dakota, but everybody has that chase that’s just golden. Of course we want those in the archive, but we also need the bad ones. We need the ones where you drove five hours, didn’t see anything worth taking a photo for, didn’t see a tornado, or you sat on the dry line all day and you didn’t get a storm to pop. The ability for us to analyze what works on a chase and what doesn’t is highly dependent on having examples in both pools.

[00:15:56] Cameron: Bingo.

[00:15:56] Kyle: You need to have those really good cases in those really bad cases. They’re both important to being able to analyze this. And even if you have cases that you aren’t proud of, we absolutely still want to see them.

[00:16:09] Cameron: We’re proud of them.

[00:16:10] Kyle: All right. Another question here for you. Changing gears just a little bit. What is the current state of Chase Archive and what are some of the future plans as far as you’re able to go into it? What are you, what are we working on right now? And do you envision this becoming?

[00:16:26] Cameron: So honestly, I think one of my favorite recent advancements was your Google doc that you made people didn’t have to crawl through my, Oh my God… that spreadsheet. Yeah. Sorry for everyone listening who, who had to do that.

[00:16:40] Kyle: Progress.

[00:16:41] Cameron: So we finally at least have a somewhat easy way to add new cases there. So right now we’re still working on our website. Thanks to Jim and a few others. We’ve been able to develop a site where we can at least plot out our cases and it can pull out all the interesting documentation for that event, like all the best photos and videos for each case. I’m envisioning something where you just, you know, click on the points on the map, like with your little monkey brain and just keep hitting all the cool chases and see what people saw. So we’re there right now and we’re also constructing the backbone for these tags, because I think these tags are going to be really important. They can help us understand what environments were conducive for. These tiny drill bit tornadoes, or these LPs, or these wedges. I think we might actually have enough data already for some kind of a rudimentary “here’s what the environment looked like for these kind of events”. So I’m hyped for that. I think behind the scenes, I’ll be doing a little bit of environmental or climatological study.

[00:17:42] Kyle: I’m- that’s what I’m most excited for. I’ll be honest.

[00:17:44] Cameron: Okay.

[00:17:45] Kyle: Looking back at that, the climate, “Oh, is there something happening in a certain season or a certain month?” Or like that. Cause you’ve already posted some of this on, on, on X, some of the findings that you’ve had already about chase days and when they seem to be occurring between years, we’ve already found some interesting stuff. So that’s what I look forward to the most right now.

[00:18:05] Cameron: Yeah, like we already have a system. And once more data gets poured into this, it’ll continuously become more accurate. But we already have a system to show you climatologically where are you going to be next year? Or like, where are you most likely to be? And of course, once we learn a little bit more about El Niño and La Niña teleconnections, etc you could actually, create composites for different types of years. Let’s say we’re expecting this kind of El Niño transition year. And your path through the Great Plains might be a little bit different than it was last year. There, there’s so much you could do. Yeah, not even on the future scale, but the past and the historical scale.

[00:18:42] Kyle: And, we might go through this process and analyze the data and realize that maybe on some of these topics, there’s not a very clear signal. But then, there might be others where we find an astounding signals that might’ve been just in front of the face this whole time, but we never were able to look at it. There’s so many fascinating things that we might be able to find.

[00:19:01] Cameron: Like for us chasers, like when you get these spring tornado forecasts and like the numbers are really high. It’s going to be a great year. That does not always correlate to our experience chasing. What if you’re living in Denver right now and are promised another awesome year and don’t get a single supercell off the Front Range? I think that this kind of historical data could help you at least pick out good years for structure on the High Plains or something like that, but just is not handled by climatology.

[00:19:29] Kyle: Absolutely. You could have a year of moderates and highs and everything, but there were like three good marginals that I liked to chase or something like that.

[00:19:38] Cameron: Seriously.

[00:19:39] Kyle: That’s also, I know we have talked about this a little bit, but I would love to know what the average SPC risk is just for funzies. What are these kinds of chases happening in? All kinds of important and maybe slightly less important, but really cool things that we can do with this. I’m very excited.

[00:19:55] Cameron: So I think I’m expecting to find an anti correlation between SPC risk.

[00:20:03] Kyle: Yeah, there’s all kinds of cool things that exist out there for us and Chase Archive is really going to be the way to do that. Cameron, how many cases are we up to right now?

[00:20:11] Cameron: I don’t think I’ve actually told you is I have… I went on an obsession spree over adding pre 1990s cases. I think we’re up to 1, 500 now.

[00:20:21] Kyle: Oh, jeez.

[00:20:23] Cameron: Yeah we got a lot of all the old famous photo tornado photos, like that. That girl standing next to that land spout, that was one of my favorite finds.

[00:20:31] Kyle: Oh, yeah.

[00:20:32] Cameron: We got a lot of them there.

[00:20:33] Kyle: I am so excited for what what this is going to become. So Cameron, what can the chaser community do right now to help us? What contributions can be made from anybody in the community right now?

[00:20:47] Cameron:: So what I have, I have two suggestions go to my Twitter profile, @CameronJnixon, and my pinned tweet is the form where you can add new cases to this. And of course, once we build a website and whatever, and put that online, it’ll be much easier. But I want you to either a just add a cool chase day that you just had, like you’re out and about one day, like you see a nice wall cloud, see some striations, maybe even a tornado add it to the case, it takes 30 seconds max. Like you just add, like a lat long where you were, what you saw, and then add a photo or video or two. And then if you want to help us dig into the climatology, if you’re a little bit more of a geek, like I am, you can try to fill in our archive from back in, like the early 2000s, 90s, 80s, if you know of a cool case you can add that there too.

[00:21:38] Kyle: Absolutely. And so this is again I kind of preface with this at the beginning of the show, but this is a project by the community, for the community, right? And so we all want to be able to have something useful here. And I think everyone can be involved in the adding of cases. And of course the process will be streamlined and there’s going to be other options for adding two cases or whatnot, when we get the website up. We have the ability to add more media or add opinions or whatnot going forward on cases. But for now, yeah, it’s just that Google form, but. There’s going to be a lot of options, I think, coming up here once that website gets gone.

[00:22:14] Cameron: I think our motto here is, what you put in, we can put out. And the more data that you give us, the more, fascinating studies that we could make of this. So that’s what I’m pumped about.

[00:22:26] Kyle: And it really is a citizen science thing, right? We’re not, none of us are doing this for our jobs. This is a hobbyist thing you don’t have to have any background. You just, if you’re a storm chaser, just help us out. That’s simple.

[00:22:37] Cameron: You say this is, we’re not doing this for our jobs. I, I remember Tornado Archive presenting at an AMS some other strategies, and I think we could actually make some academic research findings from this, especially related to like tornado visibility or structure photogenicness. I think there, there is actually something to be said there.

[00:22:57] Kyle: Who knows? Kyle There’s a big difference between what we see on radar what we see in the environment, what we see in model simulations. And what we actually see with our eyes and what’s picked up by the cameras and stuff like that. And so if we’re able to build this giant reservoir of visualizations of what’s happening, who knows what that exposes? Specifically talking about the academia side of things. A lot of options here. A lot of opportunities lots of possibilities to come. That’s for sure. Alrighty. You heard it. If you want to contribute, please contribute. Bad cases, good cases. We want all of them. Go to Cameron’s Twitter. It’s gonna be that pinned post up there. It’ll take you to a Google form. On that Google form there’s just gonna be some questions that you’ll have to fill out. Just simple stuff, date location give it some tags, some descriptor tags. And there’s a couple of extra questions on there. So anything, any cases, good cases, bad cases, if we want it all, we like it all, and that’ll really help out this project going forward. I know, Cameron, I can’t wait to see this blossom into what we have envisioned for it, and I’m sure that most of the Chaser community will certainly find benefit in this. And this is, this has a lot of opportunities to do even things beyond what we currently envision it to do I can’t wait. And I’m planning on having you back on here to talk about this specifically at some point, once we make those next steps on development here.

[00:24:21] Cameron: You got me hyped. I actually thought about this for a few days.

[00:24:26] Kyle: Here comes another 500 pre 1900 cases or something that you’re going to. Yeah. Cameron, thanks for joining me. And we’ll chat again soon. I’m very happy to be able to talk about this and especially give the public a little bit of an idea on what this is going to be and to give this some exposure. Again, if you have questions about anything, you can reach out to either one of us and we’ll be happy to answer them and again, please contribute. So Cameron, thanks so much for joining me.

[00:24:52] Cameron: Thank you.

[00:24:54] Kyle: Alrighty folks. That’s it for us today. I’ll send you off. Watch the next one. This is Chaser Chat.

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[00:25:20] Thanks again for listening, and I’ll catch you on the next episode.