Capturing the blizzard of March 2013 with time lapse video

A storm that came late in the season, the March 2013 blizzard (dubbed "Virgil" by the folks at the Weather Channel) caught many off guard in central Illinois.

In the Champaign-Urbana area, local schools cancelled class first. Then, the community college.

And at about 9 pm, the University sent out a mass email, warning UIUC spring breakers not to attempt the drive back to campus. Finally, at about 1:30 am, Illinois officially cancelled classes.

When it finished here in Urbana, Ill., the storm dropped more than 11 inches, breaking the previous March 24 snow record. In my hometown of Springfield, it dropped 18.5", beating a single-storm record that persisted for 113 years.

Snow began falling at about 2:30 pm on March 24. As soon as the snow began to fall, I started building a time-lapse setup, and took my first pictures at 2:38.

While I've detailed here before how to make a time-lapse camera, those previous designs were battery-powered, and had a life span of 12 hours. Like the previous build, this used a camera presupposed from an unmanned aircraft system.  But the forecast called for a snow that could last up to 20 hours, so I designed this setup to run on AC power instead.

As it turns out, it's much less complicated to run a time lapse camera on AC power. No battery calculations are necessary. All that's required is the camera, the camera housing, an AC extension cord, a USB cable, and an AC to USB adapter.

Time-lapse weather camera at 2:39 pm on Sunday, March 24.

The Harrisburg tornado, the JournoDrone, and a well-deserved crash

Aerial photograph of Harrisburg, IL. Not taken by JournoDrone One.

Today, the southern Illinois town of Harrisburg is morning six of its own who were killed by a 170 mile per hour, 200 yard tornado. It was one of the 16 tornadoes that ripped through Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky, claiming 13 lives.

Tuesday night, while news networks came from far and wide to cover the devastation on the ground, I worked to prepare JournoDrone One to film the disaster from the sky. For better or worse, the drone never made it to Harrisburg.

JournoDone One is a test mule for DroneJournalism.org, which myself and fellow drone journalism developer Acton Gorton hope will pave the way for a low-cost, highly durable and transportable small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) for journalists.

JD-01 had never flown a mission before, let alone been tested. So the idea of rushing to Harrisburg and filming anything was a long shot, but something I felt I needed to try. This was a disaster just three and a half hours’ drive from home base, and if I had anything to say about it, I would be putting my equipment to good use. And I do venture to natural disasters on a whim.

Of course, it wouldn’t do any good to drive to the storm-ravaged town of Harrisburg just to nose-dive a drone into the rubble after takeoff. The town had enough grief and did not need some clumsy pilot crashing drones into things and making things worse. So instead, I had a test flight in Champaign, where I dove the drone into a freezing field. Here’s what happened.