The weather on the second Saturday of the month was sunny, warm and dry, picture-perfect for mid-June in the desert.

Picture-perfect for a pool party, maybe, but for the 40 or so people who showed up at the Gangplank meeting space in Chandler, the clear skies were A) irrelevant, because they spent the day indoors and B) disappointing, because in this crowd, a perfect picture of weather would contain towering black clouds, a horizon ablaze with lightning or, if the storm gods willed it, a tornado.

This was a gathering of storm chasers and weather enthusiasts, and as much as they geeked out over the inaugural Arizona ChaserCon, almost all of them would have chosen to head out on the backroads in pursuit of bad weather, the clouds and lightning and dust storms — oh, yes, the dust storms — that accompany the moody monsoon.

Instead, they gathered on plastic chairs with snacks from Costco as the blue sky taunted outside.The sour cherry on top: The Arizona monsoon was to start the next day and there wasn't an elevated dew-point temperature in sight.

Such is a storm chaser's life, and wasn't that the point of this storm chasers' gathering: to meet others whose pulses also quickened with a new echo on the radar map, whose cameras also bore the scuffs of tipping over in a downdraft, whose families also learned to cancel plans during the summer.

No one at the event, which ran for six hours, with time out for lunch at the sub shop next door, dressed like an occluded front or a microburst. About all that ChaserCon shared with the famed Comic-Con (and its Phoenix cousin that had wrapped up a week earlier) was the three-letter abbreviation for convention and the promise of a community.

So, the community came, video-streaming laptops in hand, smartphone apps at the ready, to watch — if not for lightning, then for stars. The anticipation grew even if the dust clouds didn't.

"I'm dying right now for the monsoon to get started," said Mike Olbinski as he flashed through his photographs and time-lapse videos on a wall screen.

The crowd oohed and aahed and cheered. Olbinski was one of the rock stars at the event, a chaser and photographer whose images show up in television weather coverage, who sells prints of skyline-consuming dust clouds, whose T-shirt on this day read "I like big haboobs."

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Arizona can't compete with Tornado Alley in the Midwest for the throngs of storm chasers on the road whenever weather churns, but the number of chasers has grown and social media has allowed them to connect.

All the experienced chasers maintain photo-filled feeds on Twitter and Instagram. Some have their own YouTube channels. A few live-stream on specialized websites. They occasionally team up to chase a storm, piling in one vehicle and bringing back their own interpretation of what they find.

So, why weren't they jamming together, sharing war stories, talking shop? Christian Cleary kept asking that question until he decided to answer it himself and organize the first meet-up.

Cleary had been a weather junkie since he was a kid in Phoenix. He would watch storms moving in and finally his mom offered to take him out chasing. He has since built his own "dome cam," a small camera mounted under a clear dome that he attaches to the outside of his car (and a rig that was on display Saturday). He works as a waiter at a restaurant that closes after lunch, freeing his later afternoons to chase.

Not long ago, he made his first trip to Tornado Alley.

"I really can't recall a day when I woke up and said, 'I like clouds,' " he said Saturday as he kicked off ChaserCon, almost bouncing off the floor as he spoke. "I live off convection. Storms are what I live for. I hibernate during the off-season and count down the days till May and June."

The convention almost became an obsession. He had started hanging out with some of the established chasers, who liked his passion and self-taught skills, and found friends in many of them, so lining up speakers was easy.

He scouted out Gangplank, a collaborative work space on Arizona Avenue, and landed it as the venue.

He scored two high-profile guests in Royal Norman, the veteran Channel 3 meteorologist, and Matt Pace, a former chaser (in a '69 VW bus, may it rest in peace) and now a meteorologist on 12 News.

All he needed were others like him.

On a couch near the front window of the meeting space, Randy Walton popped open his laptop and scrolled through video collections and a national live-streaming site popular among other chasers called StormScape, owned by a veteran chaser and meteorologist named Michael Phelps ("Not the swimmer," Walton said automatically).

Walton contributes to StormScape, sometimes with video from Arizona, sometimes from the Midwest. Many Arizona chasers make the trip to tornado country at least once a year as they await the monsoon.

"A lot of it is adrenaline rush," said Michael Dentzer, an East Valley chaser who was watching Walton work. "But some of it is research. And a lot of us are in contact with the National Weather Service. It can be thrilling, but the ultimate goal is to make people safe."

Sandra Borchers grew up in the Midwest and saw her share of twisters. It's where she cultivated her chasing chops. Now, she lives in the East Valley and will admit she likes the excitement of a chase.

"My favorite are the haboobs," she said, "the big ones. I can watch the dust storms build from my house. The lightning is something else, too. I get a thrill out of it."

"For me," Dentzer said, "the possibility of getting a funnel cloud here, to be there for the one event that makes history, that's what I'm waiting for."

One of the hot topics at ChaserCon is the rare Arizona funnel cloud. A speaker near day's end would comb data and ask the question of whether an EF-5 tornado, the strongest measured by meteorologists, could ever develop in the state (Answer: Improbable, but not impossible).

Chasers talked about their preferred vantage points. Borchers and Dentzer liked their perch on the east side. Dale Krause and James Riddle said they find good views from the west.

They watch as storms build and fade, waiting for the right moment to head out. When a big one hits, the chasers say they earn their name. They chase.

If the TV weather guys filled ChaserCon's celebrity quotient, Ken Waters, the warning-coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Phoenix, gave the event a dose of science and a sort of weather agency seal of approval.

Waters talked about surveying the damage after a microburst in Ahwatukee during the 2013 monsoon, "if you remember that," he said, and the nods and chorus of "yes" and "yep" confirmed that most everyone did.

And he recalled the "old days" when dew-point readings — a measure of humidity in the air — determined the start of the monsoon instead of set dates (June 15-Sept. 30), a change not always seen fondly by some weather wonks.

But he also reiterated the role storm chasers play in helping the weather service track storms with reports and images that fill in the gaps left by official tracking equipment.

Earlier in the day, Norman, the Channel 3 forecaster, handed out T-shirts with a single word, "#groundtruth." It's a term used to describe the on-scene information gathered and reported by trained storm spotters and storm chasers, information that sometimes corrects data reported by radar or remote sensing equipment.

It's also a role the chasers take seriously. Some have undergone storm-spotter training with the weather service. Most know how to read weather charts and keep radar apps on their smartphones and detailed notes stuffed with observations. Most will share whatever they know with the weather service.

"Sometimes the first time we see or hear about a storm is from the chasers," Norman said. "Sometimes, radar isn't seeing the initial stages of a dust storm. Chasers are our eyes on the storm."

While chasers were the attendees at ChaserCon, they were also the stars.

Olbinski was a weather nerd as a kid and took pictures now and then during a storm. Years later, he found one of the images and realized it wasn't half-bad. He started shooting storms from his backyard and his street and one of them showed up on 12 News.

He was hooked. "I realized I didn't have to do it from the street corner," said Olbinski, a wedding photographer when the weather is good. "I could chase." He's been at it about six years now and has won a fan in his 5-year-old daughter, who tags along on trips.

He played a time-lapse video of a dust storm moving into Phoenix and someone asked him to replay it. He did, to cries of "wow!" and "oh, cool!"

And he left the room with advice from a vet: Be safe, especially in electrical storms.

"If you're not scared of lightning," he said, "you should be."

Bryan Snider, a pilot and professional photographer, fell in love with Arizona's weather when he moved here in 2007. He remains in awe of Arizona's landscape and its weather. He talked about a trip to the Grand Canyon last July, where he is convinced he watched a storm follow the contours of the canyon walls.

"It's so unpredictable," he said, a characteristic of the monsoon meteorologists won't dispute.

He has worked with other storm chasers to develop a new website (azchasers.com) to connect chasers with meteorologists and other weather enthusiasts and build more of the community Cleary envisioned with ChaserCon.

"I'm hoping we can promote community over competition," Snider said. "It can get nasty in the Midwest." Earlier, Cleary had talked about the insane chaser traffic during a tornado outbreak.

Two days after the Arizona convention, two storm chasers lit up the Internet after a deadly outbreak of tornadoes in Nebraska, one for his stunning photo of twin twisters outside Wisner, Neb., and one for a picture of a 5-year-old storm victim.

Such storms remind chasers of the risks of what amounts to a hobby for most. In his introduction, Cleary reminded fellow chasers to travel safely and to respect landowners and law-enforcement authorities. He recalled getting chased away from a storm scene near Casa Grande by Border Patrol officers who thought he was a drug smuggler.

"The Arizona monsoon is like a goodie bag," he said. "There's always a surprise deep inside it."

It turned out that, like the comic-book convention, ChaserCon was a geek fest and without apology. By day's end, words like "haboobalicious" had entered the conversation and people were recalling favorite storm events (last year's "Eloy monster" came up more than once).

In the final hour, Trey Greenwood, a meteorology student at Arizona State University, delivered the most technical presentation of the day, the one about tornadoes. It was thick with charts and data and terms like "convective available potential energy." And the people in the audience ate it up.

Cleary ended the day with a promise of a second convention next year. The weather was holding outside and the forecast wasn't promising, but as they scattered, the chasers insisted their time was approaching.

Good weather can't last forever.

Reach the reporter at shaun.mckinnon@arizonarepublic.com.

Does your pulse pound when lightning flashes across an ominous summer sky? Do you run to the nearest window to watch as mountains of dust roll over the horizon?

Do you give chase with your smartphone to capture photos and videos of Arizona's stunning monsoon for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter?

Please share your photos and videos from this year's monsoon. On Twitter, tag #azmonsoon or #azwx to share tweets, photos and videos. Then check out monsoon.azcentral.comto see what we feature there.