7/24 - 4pm - 2011 Great Plains Storm Chase Video

From May 7th to June 4th this year I had the privilege of again being a tour guide with Storm Chasing Adventure Tours, a company I've worked with for four years. We traveled well over 10,000 miles during my time in the Great Plains and saw numerous supercell thunderstorms with wall clouds and even a few funnel clouds. There were also a few episodes when we came very close to tornadoes, with one touching down right in front of us at night in South Dakota. Check out my "mini documentary" video of all the things I saw this year below or on my storm chasing page at RyanHoke.com:

This video is available in 720p or 1080p HD

6/7 - 11:15am - New Storm Chasing Highlights Page

I just posted a page on my website with all my best video and photos from this year's storm chase. You can access this page from the front of RyanHoke.com or follow this link: http://ryanweather.org/stormchasing2010.html. Also, my tornado video from last Monday near Campo, Colorado has been posted on the TornadoVideos.net YouTube account. Should be interesting to see how many views it receives!

An EF3-rated tornado near Millbury, Ohio killed seven people and damaged numerous homes and businesses on Saturday (read more). We were fortunate that none of the tornadoes we saw over the past few weeks damaged any homes or caused injuries, so it's very difficult to hear about a tornado that did. This underscores the importance of having access to severe weather warnings via NOAA Weather Radio or an electronic notification service, especially because tornadoes can strike at night when you're unprepared. Experiencing tornadoes out in open fields while storm chasing is one thing, but having a tornado hit your hometown is completely different. Stay safe this season!

10/18 - 3pm - MSU Forecast

A nice sunny day is in progress with temperatures near 60 around the area. A Freeze WARNING is in effect tonight as temperatures drop below the freezing mark in some spots around the Golden Triangle. We should warm up into the 70's this week before a cold front comes through on Thursday:


Hurricane Rick is making headlines as a Category 5 hurricane south of Baja California. It is expected to make landfall early Thursday morning. We may receive some moisture from Rick, which could influence how much rain we get on Thursday. Here's the latest 5-day track from the National Hurricane Center:


Need a National Weather Service weather forecast for your iGoogle homepage or website? My dad has programmed a small gadget that can give you the latest NWS forecast based on your location. Simply add it to your custom iGoogle homepage or add the code to your website to get the latest forecast anytime! Click here to find out more.

7/10 - 3pm - New Website, Traveling

I just launched my new website at http://ryanhoke.com and http://ryanweather.org. This new site will not feature weather forecasts for Louisville like Ryan Weather did, but you can still find all the archived forecast videos on there. My blog has also switched over from Ryan Weather as well, so I'll be blogging about weather news, college, and meteorology.

I'm going on vacation starting tomorrow and I won't be back for two weeks. I'll be sure to post when I come back, which will be only a couple weeks before I go down to Mississippi State. Busy month coming up!

7/9 - 7:45pm - Dry For Now, Rain Coming This Weekend

It's been nice and dry around here today, and it looks like we'll continue that trend with warmer temperatures tomorrow. Temperatures should hold steady in the upper 80's and lower 90's as we continue through the weekend, but rain chances will become an issue starting on Saturday. We'll see a daily chance for rain until Wednesday of next week, but I don't think we'll see rain on each one of those days.

The new replacement website for Ryan Weather is almost done and should be up and running tomorrow. Tomorrow will be my last Louisville weather blog post as well. I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks, and then I'll begin posting every few days about general weather topics and college.

7/6 - 3:45pm - Here Comes Some Hot Weather!

Looks like we're finally done with the rain for a little while here. High pressure forming off to our west will drive precipitation northward, which also means temperatures will be on the increase. Expect highs near 90 around the area tomorrow, with mid 90's entering the picture by the weekend. Our next rain chance will happen on Saturday as this pattern falls apart a bit, but it doesn't look like rain totals will be very high at this point.

More rain is possible next week, but temperatures shouldn't buckle like they did with last week's rain.

With only a few days left of operation, here are some interesting numbers about Ryan Weather:

2 live TV appearances
2 weather video awards
4 tornadoes witnessed with Storm Chasing Adventure Tours
30 months of website operations
106 video forecasts
265 minutes (estimated) of video forecasts
818 blog posts
1,000 blog visits during Hurricane Ike Wind Storm 2008
3,500 blog visits during Ice Storm 2009
14,337 website visits since May 2007
21,884 blog visits since November 2007

7/4 - 5pm - The Final Video Forecast

Rain is falling and will really affect any Independence Day plans you may have. Fireworks will be a wet ordeal and nature may provide some of its own with thunder and lightning. Looks pretty dry after today!



This video was made in high definition thanks to a new camera I just received. If your computer is having trouble playing this video back smoothly, click the HD button on the video player to turn off high definition and revert to a standard definition version. You can also view this video in its highest resolution by clicking the full screen button on the video player.

This is my last video forecast with Ryan Weather. It's time to transition the website to an online resume and archive so I can start getting serious about my meteorology career in college. It's been great fun learning more about weather and broadcasting over the past two and a half years, and I thank everyone for tuning in and looking at my website!

7/2 - 12:30pm - Cloudy and Cool in July, Ryan Weather Transition

It's July 2nd, but you'd never know it by taking a walk outside. We're at 68 degrees right now and I don't think we'll get much above 70 because of the cloud cover across the region this afternoon. Clouds should finally move away tomorrow and temperatures should return to seasonable levels, which means the mid 80's.

Rain for Saturday is still in question at this point. The latest NAM run shoves the rain south of here and keeps us dry for the most part, but the GFS is still insistent on giving us a moderate rain on Saturday afternoon and maybe into the evening. The GFS also gives us a pretty good shot of rain on Sunday too. I'm still not convinced that we'll see as much rain as the GFS is giving us, so we'll give it another day before a July 4th forecast is firmed up.

This Saturday's video forecast will be the very last one that I'll do for Ryan Weather. With a two-week vacation coming up and college starting next month, I can't continue to do Louisville weather anymore. Here's how this transition is going to work:

• Ryanweather.org will turn into a online résumé for my upcoming career, also available at http://ryanhoke.com. Storm chasing photos, archived Ryan Weather forecast videos, and any news that comes up will be posted there as well.
• This blog will continue on, but posts will not be centered around Louisville weather as they have been. Expect posts about what I'm learning about in my upcoming meteorology classes, college life at Mississippi State, weather news, and anything else that's going on. Posts will likely not be as frequent as they have been, maybe a post every few days at worst. Regular Louisville weather postings will cease on July 10th.
  
• The storm chasing blog will still be up and running as usual when I'm in Tornado Alley next spring.

I'm still in the process of designing and coding my new website, so it may take a few weeks to get everything switched over and running. I really wish I could continue forecasting for the Louisville area, but it wouldn't be practical to do it from Starkville, MS, especially if my college life gets really busy. I'll still be around on Facebook, Twitter, and my blog. It's been a pleasure to run my website and blog over the past two and a half years, and I'd like to thank everyone who's been checking them out.

I'll likely be back doing forecast videos again in a couple years at Mississippi State, but the big leagues are not far away either. I started this website in 2007 to help me get accustomed to working on-air and delivering weather information to viewers, with the hope that I could get ahead in a field where competition is fierce. Needless to say, the site went far beyond its original intentions.

It will be bittersweet to complete my final video this Saturday, but I'm extremely excited to be moving on to getting my meteorology degree and starting my broadcast career immediately after. Broadcast meteorology requires moving around the country quite a bit for at least the first few years, but I'd like to come back to Louisville at some point. Who knows, maybe the right job opening will come up here in town and it'll be like old times again!

6/20 - 1am MDT - Time to Go Home, Aurora Aftermath

As we made our way back to Denver today, we were able to stop by Aurora, NE to see the damage caused by the EF2 wedge tornado we saw there on Wednesday. We were shocked by the extent of the damage because we never could really grasp how severe the tornado was while we were chasing it:


We drove by that house you see in the first photo right before the tornado touched down. There was a barn there as well. I'm happy to report that the family living in that house, including four kids, escaped unharmed by staying in their basement. Only the edge of the tornado hit the house, but the barn next to it took the full force of the EF2 winds. Only a small pile of red-painted wood debris was left from the barn, which was less than a year old.

Here's the path of the tornado with our route and stopping points (orange dots):


Notice how one of our stopping points, the first orange dot, was right in the path of the tornado at its highest EF2 intensity. We were about 250 yards away from the tornado at this point and you can see how scary that looked in the video I posted on Wednesday.

For a complete survey report from the National Weather Service, click here.

I'm leaving Denver tomorrow to return to Louisville. It's been a thrilling two weeks with tons of supercells, my video of a supercell in Kiowa County, KS airing on Good Morning America, sightings of VORTEX2 and the Tornado Intercept Vehicle, hail covering I-70 east of Denver, and of course my first four tornado sightings on Wednesday near Aurora, NE.

By the way, I also just uploaded the brand-new website for Storm Chasing Adventure Tours at http://stormchasing.com. Even if you can't book a tour with us next year, be sure to get an official Storm Chasing Adventure Tours t-shirt at our store on the website!

It's sad to be leaving Tornado Alley, but I'm also happy to be coming home after two weeks on the road. It's been great chasing this week with our tornado-proof group:

2/19 - 6pm - Ryan in the News... Yet Again!

Davis Instruments (the maker of the weather station in my front yard) posted a story about me in their February E-Newsletter today:

Ryan Hoke is still in high school, but he knows just what he will be studying at Mississippi State University this fall: meteorology. He plans to use his degree, his love of weather, and his unruffled charm as a television weather broadcaster. The young weatherman is already a sort of institution in his hometown of Fisherville, Kentucky, where he keeps the public informed of local weather on his Ryan's Weather web site and in weekly videos he produces and posts to his web site. He has even been a guest weather broadcaster on WAVE TV 3. (A video of him on WAVE TV 3 is pretty impressive. It looks to us like he has been doing the weather in front of a camera for years!)

And he is not just a proud weather geek, he's a proud, entrepreneurial weather geek! Check out the store on his site where he sells such very cool things as tee-shirts that say, "I'm a Weather Geek. Are YOU?" (Altogether now: "Yesssss!!")

And what kind of station does the Boy Wonder use? Of course, it's a Vantage Pro2.

Ryan was featured in a story by Charlie White in the Courier-Journal. If you happen to run into Ryan, you might want to ask for his autograph now and beat the crowds.

To see the full article and picture from Davis Instruments, click here. Want one of those cool T-shirts mentioned in the article? Click here.

Needless to say, I'm floored by this article and I think Davis does a great job with the newsletter.

10/9 - 4:30pm - Foggy!

It was surreal getting out of bed this morning and not being able to see the house across the street. The fog that developed last night stayed around until mid morning in some locations. There's only a few instances where I can remember fog being that thick at my house, so this was definitely out of the ordinary.

Temperatures are still expected to soar into the mid 80's by Sunday with a cool-down into the 70's expected by early next week. There's still a chance of showers in the forecast for Tuesday night into Wednesday.

The website is now working after being unreachable yesterday for a majority of the day. Hopefully the servers at my hosting service will stay afloat for a while.

10/8 - 7:15pm - Back in Town, Website Down

I checked my site and blog a couple times during my vacation to make sure they were in working condition. To my horror, my website was out when I got home from school this afternoon! After checking around, I found out that my hosting service is experiencing a miniature crisis with servers down at the moment. They're saying the problem should be fixed very soon. Let's hope so!

In other news, we've seen quite a bit of rain today. My gauge at home shows .63" of rain since midnight, with likely higher amounts around the area. Fog will be a problem tonight and early tomorrow morning with all this moist air dropping in temperature. We will soar into the 80's for the weekend after a day in the upper 70's tomorrow. A cool down to more seasonable temperatures will occur by early next week with a chance of rain thrown in late Tuesday into Wednesday.

Bundle up folks... If AccuWeather's just-released Winter forecast is right, we're in for a frigid few months... click here.

Also, Henry Margusity at AccuWeather has released his own Winter forecast with maps... click here.

9/14 - 12pm - Hold on to Your Hats!

A Wind Advisory is in effect until 8pm tonight. Gusts of up to 40mph are expected. The SPC has us in a SLIGHT Risk for severe storms and a 5% chance of tornadoes, which means a couple isolated tornadoes could pop up around the region. While Ike's remains are barreling toward us, there's a gap in the system that will come through here unless there's more development later today. If we do get that gap in the storms, then we're going to be dry today. Quite honestly I think there will more storms developing in that gap as heating gets going today, so be ready for those.

After a rocky start yesterday with domain name issues, my new website is now fully functional and online. Check it out at http://ryanweather.org.

9/13 - 1pm - New Forecast Video, New Website

A rainy couple of days ahead and then clearing for the workweek!



My new website is now online. Just go to ryanweather.org and take a look at the changes! You'll get a "Location Change" redirect page for the next few hours as the servers switch my domain name over, but all you have to do is wait 5 seconds and you're there!

9/7 - 2pm - Ike's in Cuba, 500th Post!

Hurricane Ike is still very strong as a Category 4 storm, getting ready to hit Cuba lengthwise. After the damage it caused in Haiti and the Turks and Caicos, Cuba won't be an exception. It should make landfall tonight and weaken to a Category 1 by the time it exits Cuba on Tuesday. Still no details on landfall other than it will be on the Gulf Coast in Texas or Louisiana:




(NOTE: The CLP5 and XTRP lines on the spaghetti chart are not to be used as forecast tracks)

So, we'll have to really watch what Ike does in terms of direction and strength this week.

We're still on track here for a chance of rain here on Tuesday. Temperatures should be in the low 80's all week, with tomorrow and Thursday being the exception in the upper 80's.

By the way, this is my 500th post for those keeping track. That's pretty good for just under 2 years of blogging I'd say. On that note... the Ryan Weather website is receiving a major overhaul. It's being rebuilt from scratch and I'm dropping Google Pages as my host, so you won't see anymore outages due to bandwidth issues. Expect to see the new site in the next couple of weeks if not earlier.