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January 13 brought the potential of rotating storms in Florida as a vigorous low with a trailing cold front, along with a jet streak coming through the Gulf of Mexico, made conditions ripe. Not bad for January. Cheryl Chang and I headed north on I-95, with my dog Gracie along as well. Here, Cheryl uses Gracie's bone to indicate our navigational options. Not long later, around Bimini on Route 100 (west of Bunnell and southwest of Espanola), we saw this tiny, corkscrewing updraft. Digital images.

The sky was full of variety as several storms and a rainbow passed within our view on county road 305. We were in a tornado watch box. Digital images.

This pretty storm began to look interesting, forming what appeared to be small wall clouds. Digital images.

There was some hot lightning with the storm. Images from video.

The storm began sucking in inflow and reorganizing. It was starting to look more and more like a rotating storm from the Plains! Digital images.

As the storm reorganized, the base acquired a rounder appearance, with signs of some rotation. Digital images.

Darkness was falling. We were running out of time and light, not to mention about to get into view-obscuring trees. We paused to film what looked like a wall cloud on the storm. Gracie was taking it in stride. This was really our last good view, near Espanola; what we saw of the storm after that seemed to indicate that it lost some of that organization that made it look so menacing. Up and down Florida's east coast, cells raced northeast, out to sea. As we drove south, we saw some pretty lightning in them as the full moon cast a blue light upon their bubbling tops. Digital and video images. (I've bumped up the contrast on this last image, from video, since it was shot through the rain in dim light.)