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Ozz on the Great Sand Dunes, CO Ozz at the Great Sand Dunes, CO Ozz in Norway autumn 2005 Ozz and his angry Snowman Ozz at the ECSS conference Ozz & Sneeuwvlok (his cat) Ozz at Pic du Midi Ozz meets a husky in Alaska (1) Ozz meets a husky in Alaska (2) Ozz in the camper in Alaska Ozz with his new EOS 5D (May 2006) Ozz drives through Colorado (May 2006) Ozz shoots lightning in Colorado (May 2006) Ozz under the Texas sun (May 2006) Ozz and his girlfriend Carmen (August 2006) Ozz in Gherla, Romania (April 2006) Ozz and a LP supercell in Nebraska (2 June 2006)

Something about me, for the interested. My name is Oscar van der Velde. I was born the 28th of January 1977 in Bedum, 10 kilometers north of Groningen in The Netherlands. I lived there till I started my Meteorology studies at age 18. I chose a research career in thunderstorms and lightning and completed my Ph.D. degree on sprites and gigantic jets. Currently I live in Sant Vicenç de Castellet, Spain (province of Barcelona), with a great view on the mountain Montserrat.

Was I born as a weather freak? Actually, no. It gradually happened over the years. Only on special occasions I remembered actively looking at the weather in my childhood. I remember the snow dunes being higher than myself in February 1979 when I walked near my home with my father and our dog, and some other winter weather occasions. I recall hours of frighteningly close thunders during a night on a camping at the island of Ameland in July 1985. My first forecasting abilities apparently grew during these years. At the age of about seven, I always thought we were going to have thunder if everybody was barbecueing and the sky turned dark with some white clouds in front, while little black bugs landed on everything white or yellow. Still pretty useful, I must say, considering the much greater knowledge I have now.

After the hobby of drawing birds at the age of nine to eleven, playing with Lego, and setting things on fire (like the neighbours' fence) with my burning glass, I got a cheap camera and started taking pictures. Nothing to write home about. I also got interested in stars and planets and had some books about the weather. It was fun to recognize clouds and name them and during another vacation on the Dutch island of Ameland in the Wadden Sea, where I went each year with my parents and my two younger brothers, my brother Arthur and I saw a waterspout in contact with the water while we were walking through the dunes! It was a great sight! I made my first real weather picture but unfortunately with crappy camera and film!

During my highschool time at the H.N. Werkmancollege in Groningen I was quite a nerd having fun imitating my teacher's voices, walking around with hydrochloric acid dissolving things, and doing electrolysis experiments at my own room with an AC/DC adapter. One of the fun experiments was to use carbon kathodes and collect the gas in a jar. With a saline solution you end up with a bottle of hydrogen mixed with chlorine, which you let explode opening it near a candle. My room smelled worse than a swimming pool at times! Apart from this, I also built huge card houses up to 14 floors reaching about a meter high and listened to somewhat weird music from Kraftwerk.

I started my Meteorology studies at Wageningen University in 1995. I also started becoming more seriously busy in photography. From October 1996 to June 1997 I had a point-and-shoot zoom camera but I became frustrated with its limited possibilities and image quality, especially during a fabulous lightning show May 16th, 1997 in Wageningen. I sold the point-and-shoot camera to my mother. Actually I already had a second-hand SLR camera but I did not use it anymore because it had a light leak. I decided to buy a new SLR camera in early June 1997.

As I began my website in early June 1996 (at GeoCities.com/CapeCanaveral/2077), it wasn't much more than a short story about me, my waterspout photo, and links to the few Dutch weather fanatics who also had a homepage at that time. The homepage and photography hobby supported each other. It is nice to show your work and communicate with other weather enthusiasts via mailinglists (like Bijzonder Weer, for reporting severe and unusual weather in The Netherlands, which I moderated since 1998 but the last years everyone uses forums. Of course it did take me longer to complete my studies because of my internet hobby. My photography hobby was easily paid from my weekend job at the Dutch KPN Telecom.

My website became more interesting as I added more photos and the accompanying stories. I also made animated weather radar loops from Meteo Consult images (available freely at the university) and manually put them online from time to time. This somewhat illegal practice was enjoyed by other weather enthusiasts :]

Meanwhile, I specialized in the physics and forecasting of thunderstorms and in radar meteorology by performing some studies as a part of my Master's thesis. I studied the relation between lightning activity and radar parameters (trends in echo top heights, vertically integrated liquid, reflectivity) from a thunderstorm as a six months research at the Dutch national weather service, the KNMI. I like the subject of storm electrification and its complicated relations with the near environment of the storm and its internal microphysical structure and dynamics. In summer 1999 I bought the book "The Electrical Nature of Storms" by MacGorman and Rust (1998), which gives a full overview of anything you can think of on lightning. Eventually, I was welcome to perform further research with Dr. Don MacGorman in Oklahoma in the first half of 2001! I investigated relations between lightning activity and precipitation type distributions with height in a very interesting supercell thunderstorm. Since Oklahoma lies in the heart of "Tornado Alley", I had a good time shooting a lot of lightning photos and I even chased some tornadoes, together with my chase friend Michael James.


In September 2002, I finally graduated. In July 2003 I finished my first temporary job, at the KNMI. I have constructed an atmospheric sounding and derived timeseries of meteorological parameters made of aircraft and surface data, as an addition for the expensive rawinsondes (balloon measurements) that are only launched twice a day. This should provide the forecasters with more recent upper air data for monitoring critical weather situations. Between May 2004 - February 2008, I had a Ph.D. position at Laboratoire d'Aérologie in Toulouse (France), investigating thunderstorms which produce discharges which reach up into the ionosphere, also known under fairytale names like sprites, jets, elves, trolls...

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Back to my hobbies... besides photography, the weather and internet, I love to listen to music in which I have multiple layers and instruments to discover, especially Dead Can Dance, Mike Oldfield (be sure to listen several times his album Amarok), Tangerine Dream (1974-1982 work is great!), Kraftwerk, Metallica, Dire Straits, Enya, Massive Attack, VNV Nation, and some others. I also like to play Worms World Party (but hell, it crashes on Windows Vista) and the board game Settlers of Catan, as far as I´m not losing too badly ;)