Storms are at my core
If you don’t know from my first column, I am an avid weather guy. Not just the casual “I like to know the weather today” guy. I am the guy who is really into weather, severe weather to be exact.
I’m a storm chaser but it goes beyond that. I am the president and had been the newsletter editor for the Twin Cities Meteorological Society. I am also a lead trainer and board member for Metro Skywarn, which teaches SKYWARN severe weather spotters for the National Weather Service here in the Twin Cities.
When the weather is stormy, I’m squirmy and unfocused if I can’t be out chasing it around. It’s something that’s been with me since I was a very young boy.
My family recalls me around the age of five doing such things as licking a finger, holding it up in the air, and then proclaiming, “The wind is from the south at 10.4 miles per hour and it’s 75 degrees.” Presumably the finger method is something I learned from watching NFL quarterbacks of the day.
Over the years the technology and knowledge surrounding severe weather has grown vastly. In my early days of storm chasing in the late 1990’s, I’d just go out and chase when any weather was out there. No knowledge of what I was doing or what was happening.
In the early 2000’s, I finally had a phone with a one-inch screen that was COLOR and had a whopping few hundred lines of resolution! That data was INSANE! I had “live” radar that was pumped out every 15 minutes. That data was about 5-10 minutes old in itself which made the data anywhere from 20-25 minutes old in actuality. It was better than what I had before which was just my eyes!
During that same time, more serious storm chasers with a little bit of money could buy equipment to receive satellite radar and weather data via a paid subscription. Initially the receivers were big, about the size of a carry-on suitcase. They quickly came down in size to nothing more than the size of a small sandwich. This wasn’t something I couldn’t afford. The subscription service was over $100 a month at that time.
Electronics and cellular data networks quickly progressed. In 2006, I had my first smart phone with 3G. It was great for data but still slower and cumbersome. It was usable for storm chasing though and the data was only 5-10 minutes old as opposed to the 20-25 minutes. The ability to view more than one radar product at a time wasn’t really an option. It was also difficult to pull up ground observation and forecast model data.
Cellular data was initially very spotty too so you would have many holes where you got nothing. You relied on a McDonald’s or public library that had free wi-fi that you could stop by and connect to.
I would sometimes go storm chasing with my phone but on more serious chases, in this range from 2006 to about 2012, I would go out with my laptop and a 3G mobile wifi hotspot. This allowed for more efficient data transfer and I could view useful tools needed.
The advent of 4G, and now 5G, technology and more powerful phones and tablets eventually led to downsizing to just those two items. This is generally what I go chasing with today. In fact, about 90% of the time I solely use just my cell phone to go storm chasing. I prefer having my tablet to use because it makes more things possible but it’s something I don’t always want to mess with.
It’s crazy for me to think that 20 years ago I would deal with standard definition video and had to go home to edit and send it in for sale on a computer and now I deal with 4K resolution video that I edit on my phone and send in. Sometimes, some of the video might even be shot on my phone, but it certainly isn’t as good of quality as my cameras.
People ask me varying questions. I will give you a few common ones and answers to them.
Question
Why would you want to go out chasing clouds? It seems so boring.
Answer
Storms are amazing. The structure, the beauty, the temporary nature of them. You can’t see it if you aren’t there. It’s just absolutely fascinating to me. The hunt of it and the friends I have made and meet with it. It is absolutely incredible the things weather can create and do.
Question
Why do you like to document people’s lives getting ruined?
Answer
It isn’t that I like documenting people’s lives getting ruined, it is a byproduct of what nature creates meeting with human-made creations and human life. Storms are and can be very dangerous, especially if you are not skilled with dealing with them and don’t heed the advice and warnings given to you when you are not skilled. Documenting damage does serve a purpose beyond it being something that can be sold. The National Weather Service can use that to estimate wind speeds and continue building a database that can be useful in understanding weather. It can also benefit people directly affected for insurance purposes, where they have a record of it and usually before the scene has been altered. I have often seen insurance companies try to get out of paying homeowners of what is rightly deserved by them.
Question
What’s the strangest thing you have ever seen storm chasing?
Answer
While traveling to go storm chasing near Omaha, we ran into a layer of extremely low and dense clouds along the Minnesota/Iowa border. As we passed the wind turbine farms down there, you could only see the bottom half of the blades’ rotation. The cloud base was right at the level of the center of the blades rotation and so thick you couldn’t see it as it rotated on the upper half.
Question
Did you ever get in a situation where you felt like you might get hurt or worse?
Answer
Yes.
More than once. Pretty much any time I have ever been in one of those situations it has been because a combination of two items. 1. I am in close proximity to dangerous things. 2. The environment changed drastically very rapidly. Storms are very dynamic. I often hear that tornadoes and other weather do “unpredictable” things. I don’t see things this way. Storms operate within the boundaries of the environment they are in and within the confines of where the different parts of a storm lie. When you put yourself inside of that confined area, those things are possible to happen.
Example I will give you one example of a situation when I was scared. About 10 years ago, when the VORTEX 2 project was still underway, I found myself in a precarious situation. The VORTEX 2 project was a government funded research project to gather large data sets surrounding severe storms to try and better understand why some storms create tornadoes and some do not. It included the involvement of dozens of entities and they traveled with over 100 vehicles. There were multiple DOW (Doppler Radar on Wheels) vehicles. There were people who would deploy weather probes to try and get in and around tornadoes. There was even a team with a special vehicle called the TIV, Tornado Intercept Vehicle, run by Sean Casey, to deploy in the path of weaker tornadoes to gather data and film.
The TIV is something you may have seen on the popular television series Storm Chasers. Casey brought the vehicle to the Minnesota State Fair a few years back at the Fox 9 booth, promoting his IMAX film. Myself and a few other prominent local chasers, along with Brandon Ivey from the show, promoted and answered people’s questions about the TIV at the fair.
So, the TIV, the DOWs, and dozens of other support vehicles, create a long convoy that generally moves fairly slow. In 2012, I was in South Dakota near Big Stone City storm chasing. Many other storm chasers were there that day too, including the VORTEX 2 team. Tightly grouped supercell thunderstorms developed, only being a few miles between each. The only river crossing within 30 miles to go east into Minnesota was at Big Stone City.
The storms moved close to the border and I decided it was time to get across before I couldn’t and would have to go south or north to cross safely. I had made it about a mile and a half from the crossing and was passing the middle of the VORTEX 2 team parked on the side of the road when suddenly they started methodically deploying.
Here I was now, in the middle of the VORTEX 2 team. My initial thought was, “This sucks. Now I am going to be slowed down getting across and going where I want to go.” Less than a mile from the crossing that thought process changed dramatically.
Conditions went from great visibility between storms to I couldn’t hardly see in front of me. The support vehicles from the VORTEX 2 convoy were shining their spotlights on the ground behind them so that people could help see where everyone was and were going to.
Suddenly, the convoy started to turn around and go back. I was unsure of why they were turning around when we were so close to the river crossing but I figured it had to be a great reason. It took us about 10 minutes to get out of the back side of the storms and another 50 minutes to go south and cross into Minnesota. The storms were too far gone at that point.
Why had they turned around though? That answer became clear when a friend of mine posted a video screenshot of a wedge-like tornado wrapped in the rain to his north. He was only about a mile south of us where we turned around. He was unable to move because it was raining so hard. I am guessing it is this circulation that the Doppler radars saw while scanning live at the front of the convey that forced the decision to turn around. This is something I am grateful for.
In a nutshell, I could have been in that tornado. I have encountered that situation less than a handful of times but I’m on high alert. I think most storm chasers would tell you that the storms are not the biggest threat but the drivers and other people.
People generally driving poorly or making poor driving decisions are a huge threat. I have had friends who had guns pulled on them while sitting at the end of someone’s driveway observing a storm. To me, other humans and their interactions are the most dangerous part of storm chasing.
A prominent storm chaser from southwest Minnesota, Andy Gabrielson, was killed about 10 years ago due to a wrong-way drunk driver coming back from a storm chase in Texas. More storm chasers are hurt and killed by other drivers than the storms themselves by far.
Storm chasing is at my core and I don’t know that I could ever live without it and be fully happy, even with threats from people as I encounter them.