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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 8/29/2023: Splashy Weather, Part 2 [1]

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Date: 2023-08-29

Good evening, Kibitzers!

See, I put off talking about “severe weather” last week and what happens? Tropical Depression Ten is a smartass and turns into Hurricane Idalia, and well ahead of schedule too. As I write on Sunday afternoon, it’s still a tropical storm sitting just south of Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula, taking its time gathering itself.

[Tuesday afternoon: Yeah, “beautiful storms” turns out to be a pretty tin-eared topic for tonight, although maybe a worse choice for tomorrow night. Idalia’s a Cat 2 hurricane now, heading for 3 (or 4!) before she hits Florida. Models they’re showing right now display determination on her part to flatten Ron DeSantis specifically, understandable for any woman. May all our Floridians, Georgians, South Carolinians, and anyone else about to get drenched be safe!]

But! “Beautiful storms” is what I’ve got, so that’s what I’m going with. Storm chaser and photographer Mike Olbinski has a YouTube channel with the usual sorts of storm-chasing videos that we see from guys (they do seem to be all guys) like Pecos Hank whom we met two weeks ago. But at the end of each storm-chasing season, he compiles seriously gorgeous art films using the footage he’s shot that year. He has several series, which we will visit. [His website is here.]

I should say that most of the films have some amount of flashing, due to lightning footage, and may be problematic for those with photosensitivities.

Olbinski resides in Arizona, and spends every summer traveling the state shooting monsoon footage. This 2014 film is the first of the time-lapse films in his Monsoon series. (Not all his series have their own separate playlists, but there is a Monsoon one.) [8:05]

This is the most recent of the Monsoon series, which I include specifically because with this entry, he’s renamed the series Níłtsą́, the Navajo word for “rain”. I’d say it is not the case that, when you’ve seen one monsoon season, you’ve seen ‘em all. [12:40]

His other major series is Vorticity, all of which (like the rest of these in the diary) can be found in his more generalized time-lapse playlist. In the spring months, he goes storm-chasing on the Great Plains, capturing the more-familiar big rotating supercells and the tornadoes they spawn. This is Vorticity 4, from 2021. [10:38]

In early 2017, he started a new series of films in black and white, as an off-season project. They don’t have a series name and are all titled differently, but they too are all in that playlist above. This first one is Pulse. [4:51]

As a 40th-birthday project in 2015, he spent two weeks storm-chasing in the plains, longer than he had ever spent before, and covered the center of the country from Texas and New Mexico up through Montana and North Dakota. This compilation from that trip, The Chase, is the forerunner of the Vorticity series. [5:56]

Here are a couple of short, single-event pieces. This one is from a day in May, 2018, north of Denver, when mammatus clouds filled the sky at sunset. [1:34]

In June, 2017, near Bismarck SD, he encountered another sunset, this time with a skyful of the fairly newly-named undulatus asperatus clouds. He comments, “The colors here are real. I only increased the contrast. In fact, I was thinking of actually REDUCING the saturation because of how intense the colors looked with the contrast added. But that's how it was and I left it that way.” [1:16]

Finally, here is something a bit different, 2017’s Mist and Water: A Lost//Discovered Film. Olbinski annually goes on a trip to some random place with his friends, during a time of year when his real business, wedding photography, is slow. (I’m not sure at this point if he still needs to shoot weddings!) This footage was taken in Oregon on such a trip, and intermixes time-lapse and drone video. [3:34]

To turn to a somewhat different topic, but still weather, Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts a YouTube show called Star Talk, and in this episode, his guest is renowned climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe [her website], explaining El Niño and its impact on climate. I tend to not get all the way through these shows because Tyson and his co-host are really bad at shutting the fuck up and letting their guests finish a sentence, but Hayhoe is obviously used to politely talking over people and is endlessly good-natured (and the two men are not being as bad as they often are), so I am willing to present it to you. She is very much worth listening to. [21:10]

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/29/2189874/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-8-29-2023-Splashy-Weather-Part-2

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