In spring we get the right combination of elements coming together to produce some of the most violent weather on the planet. That same weather can also produce some of the most awe inspiring sights. It is what I wait for every year. It is what I long to see through the long and dreary winter. Some people call me crazy. Some people think I am an idiot. Those who share the love and passion for weather understand though. I am a storm chaser.
My interest in storms goes back as long as I can remember. When I was a child my Dad and I would sit at the big picture window and watch the storms roll in, or go down in the garage as the lightning bolts crashed down around us. One time we went and looked at the tornado damage left behind by one. I could not believe that such ruin could come from a cloud.
I got to experience this destruction first hand when I was 10. We were on a fishing trip in Wisconsin. After bed one night, there was a big lightning storm. I could look out the bedroom door and see my Dad watching the lightning. I could see it too. Then all of a sudden there was this loud roar. I could barely hear Dad yell, "Get under the bed!" I could see him from under the bed trying to shut the door and he could not. A few minutes later it was over. I kept my brother awake because I could not stop shaking and it shook the whole bed we were sharing, lol.
The light of the morning revealed the devastation. A tornado had roared through the campgrounds. Trees had been slammed on cars. whole sides of cabins were ripped off. One though, the dishes were still sitting on the shelves. Boats had been flipped out of the lake. Somehow our cabin and our car only had a few twigs on them. It was the only cabin untouched. A few miles away, a trailer park got hit, throwing trailers into a lake. Several people died. This seemed to be the spark. What was it that went through in the night that I never saw?
I did a little storm chasing when I got to drive, but It was not connected with documenting it. It was a few years after graduating that I started to document my chases on film. I had this big bulky VHS video recorder. Every setting on this thing was manual. I used to tie in a tri-pod into the passenger seat and I had my "passenger" to record with and maybe even document a tornado! No one had ever heard of a storm chaser back then. It wasn't even a term. I was just a guy with a strange hobby who liked to film storms.
My first Funnel 1989
I had a lot of close calls, and made a lot of dumb moves in my early years learning the ropes. Lessons were learned by experience. Actually chasing storms then was quite different than reading about them. I got my first tornado in 1997. Long time before actually getting one, and I almost drove into it. It was an F0 in Batavia IL. It was an important storm though and ended up changing the way local Emergency services covered severe weather in Kane county and elsewhere in Northern Illinois. The calls for spotters and the alarm going out was far too late.
Over the years I have seen the explosive growth in the popularity of storm chasing. Technology has made it so easy you can almost literally just drive to a blip on your cell phone and be in position. That was not always the case. You used to really have to know and understand the environment you were in and how storm development looked like, felt like, even smelled or tasted like. It is just not the same as in the days of sniffing the dirt.
The one thing that has improved though all of this is public safety. Whether out for science or spotting, the growth in the number of people out there has helped improve lead times, and we now better understand how tornadoes are formed and what elements will likely be together for severe weather and tornadoes. We can give days warning of possible dangerous events in a general area. It really is amazing.
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