I have always been into severe weather and tornadoes especially; growing up in Houston they were a very real part of our daily routine. I remember many nights spent huddled in the ground floor bathroom with my mother under couch cushions waiting for the tornado sirens to stop. Late 2006 I was asked by a college friend of mine who works with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) in Gaithersburg if I would be interested in joining a storm chase trip with him and two of his roommates who are also meteorologists for 2007. Ever since then storm chasing is something that I plan for every year, and intend to do as much as possible. In the past 4 summers I have spent around 9 weeks traversing the Midwest chasing storms. We usually go out there towards the end of May and the beginning of June, as that is climatologically the peak time of tornado season. We have intercepted and photographed approximately 50-60 super-cellular storms and just shy of 20 tornadoes. We have chased in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Missouri. We have driven around 30,000 miles, gone from the Canadian border to south-west Texas in a day , destroyed 2 rental vehicles and damaged 1 pretty decently. We have been through storm cores with up to baseball sized hail, been hit with 80+ mph winds, and accidentally ran into a small tornado once in the middle of the night. Out of the 2 weeks we spend out there each summer, roughly 75% of our time is spent driving or otherwise in the car, 10% is spent waiting in coffee shops and dairy queens for storms to form, 10% sleeping and the other 5% actually at a storm. In that 5% though, you get the biggest rush you could ever imagine. When it comes down to it, there are few words that can really describe the sense of awe that comes over you when you stand right at the edge of a massive storm cell watching the clouds rotate right in front of you. We’ve had our share of close calls and tight situations, but for the whole we have been incredibly successful at intercepting violent storms while keeping ourselves out of danger.
