Why storm chasers chase

If we try to drive around the storm, we won't have enough daylight left to see it. So we decide to "punch the core" of the thunderstorm, forcing our way into the "bear's cage," an area between the main updraft and the hail. It's an apt name: Chasing tornadoes is like hunting grizzlies—you want to get close, but not on the same side of the river. Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you. And so we head straight into the storm and find ourselves splattering mud at 60 miles an hour 97 kilometers an hour on a two-lane road, threatening to hydroplane, visibility near zero.

Anton is less than comforting. It's like small meteorites banging down. When the storm spits us out, we stop to look back at the supercell steaming across the prairie. Its top is shaped like a giant anvil, and lightning flashes from it like artillery. Stacks of cumulonimbus clouds pompadour from its top, and dark wisps of clouds curl like imps from the "wall cloud" that has dropped from its rear flank; that's where tornadoes are known to originate.

We sprint into position down a country road and—how does this happen? Down the road are the headlights of local spotters, many of them sheriff's deputies. Spotters will react on the side of caution, and account for many false tornado sightings. But spotters' vigilance saves lives and property.

The supercell moves in with an immense, dark, roiling tapestry of clouds that leaves us gaping. Hail roar—hailstones clattering against each other as they fall from high in the storm—resonates like a Harley-Davidson. The storm does not deliver a tornado, but after it passes, lightning scorches the sky for half an hour. Brad Carter, Tim's chase partner for this trip, shakes his head.

If I had seen one right away, on the first trip, maybe I wouldn't have gotten so hooked. Disappointments arrive daily now. The morning strategy sessions, the long drives, the wild chases across the High Plains, the spectacular busts. It's been two years now without a tornado worth documenting. The tornado season is another matter entirely. It starts with an explosive string of May storms that roar through Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri, leaving entire towns for dead.

But we're still either a step behind or a step ahead. On the way to Colorado, my chase partner, Scott Elder, and I pull into Pierce City, Missouri, where just two weeks before an F3 had flattened homes and left the tidy brick shops and restaurants on the town's main street in rubble. Sixty survived there. Over pancakes one morning, Jon Davies, a veteran meteorologist from Kansas, outlines a paradox,"it's so hard to reconcile the destruction of towns and people suffering," he says,"with something you enjoy doing.

You won't see me whooping and hollering under a tornado. These things turn people's lives upside down. Tornadoes have also ripped the southern plains in the season, and by the time Carsten, Scott, and I join Tim and Anton for the chase, they have already dropped one probe into a Texas twister. Joshua Wurman's DOW trucks were out on the same storm, so there is complementary data to feed into the computer models.

Before his project, in more than ten years of trying, scientists had managed to place such an instrument exactly once: A team from New Mexico Tech made the first successful drop in By June 4 we're in a caravan of four cars barreling back down to Texas, where we chase a supercell tagged with a tornado warning into Clayton, New Mexico. On a farm road between fallow cornfields, we find ourselves perpendicular to the storm's inflow wind. Hail hacks at our rooftops.

Red-brown soil flows across the road like liquid waves. And then the world seems to simply disappear. I can see nothing but Tim's red brake lights in front of us. The convoy grinds to a halt as a sandstorm rages, its winds approaching 70 miles an hour kilometers an hour , Tim estimates. Somewhere out there a tornado may be brewing.

Tim's van begins to rock. Anton's face turns ashen. We can't see the road, only the tops of telephone poles. Twenty minutes pass. Tim finally radios us: His GPS shows a T intersection in the road ahead that we could reach, and so we roll blindly, foot by foot, out of the sandblaster. We learn later that there was a tornado somewhere in that storm, but we sure as hell couldn't see it.

Our field time is running out when we caravan into northern Nebraska on June 9. Dew points are looking good there, and the National Weather Service promises a convergence of shearing winds. For the 30th time, this may be the day we finally see a tornado. We head into the undulating dunes of the Sand Hills. The AM radio crackles with static.

Turkey towers—tall, thin cumulus clouds that bubble upward—trot along the northwestern horizon. We'll get off the highway and assess the situation. Guided by the usual mix of computer images and eyeballing, we zigzag toward the South Dakota border, and by late afternoon we're in storm mode.

A dark anvil lowers in the hurly-burly western sky. Hanging beneath it is a wall cloud—like an outboard motor to the vessel of the supercell.

Nervous technical jargon flies back and forth: "21Z analysis field shows a millibar low developing southward around Ogallala," Tim radios. The sky is now rotating majestically, and a confused bird flies into our windshield with a thump, leaving a stain of blood and feathers. And then a triangle of cloud lowers and sharpens into something pointier and leaner. It gathers into a funnel like an elephant's trunk, with the texture of soft gray cotton. It whirls like an apparition, no more than two miles three kilometers from us, looking alien in the landscape, as if a spaceship had landed.

So, it's happening—after three years of futility. I'm finally going to see a tornado. Some chasers sell video or photographs to help pay for the hobby, which can be very expensive after chasers pay for gasoline, car maintenance, hotels, food, Internet connections, data-gathering equipment and so on.

On May 24, , a chase vehicle gets close to a tornado near Medford, Oklahoma. Storm chasing rarely involves an easy drive. On one day, a chaser might be in Iowa.

The next, in western Nebraska. The next, in the Texas panhandle. And there is no guarantee of seeing anything. Many hours of driving can result in nothing but a blue sky or a few rain showers. And along the way, there are cheap hotels and bad convenience-store food. So why would people put themselves through the ordeal? The motivations vary. Some chasers experienced a close encounter with a tornado or terrible storm when they were kids, feeding their fascination with severe storms.

Some are driven by scientific curiosity. Others are simply captivated by the beauty of the sky. Part of the appeal is that every storm is different, so each storm is a puzzle to be worked out. Chasers come from all kinds of backgrounds, and many travel hundreds or thousands of miles and block out their entire vacations to chase storms in the Great Plains of the United States every spring.

That said, not every chaser helps the reputation of chasers as a whole. Many will try to warn people, either directly or by calling the National Weather Service or law enforcement officials when they see a tornado approaching.

Spotters generally stay in one area and call in their observations to the National Weather Service during a storm. Their warnings from the field can help save lives.

Most chasers start a potential chase day by checking data on the Internet. Storm chasers have their individual reasons why they began chasing storms. Most have had a life-long interest in severe weather. All share a commonality, a passion for storm chasing. Storm chasing is the pursuit of severe weather regardless of motive. While that might be true for a small number of storm chasers, nothing could be further from the truth for most storm chasers. Further, those they can name are likely all former reality television subjects.

Storms capture the imagination. While some people view anything that is potentially destructive as negative, others with positive attitudes realize that storms are natural scientific processes that will happen regardless. There is nothing else on Earth like a supercell thunderstorm. The processes inside a supercell create many different features below the anvil. There is a majestic beauty of these storms that is highly addictive once witnessed. It has nothing to do with an adrenaline rush.

No two storms are identical even though all supercells share a common structure. From the cloud formations to the colors, storms always make interesting and amazing photographs.

Not every supercell produces tornadoes. And thus, not every storm chaser chases specifically for tornadoes. The purpose of storm chasing varies from person to person. In , after many failed attempts, Samaras deployed his probe in the small community of Manchester, South Dakota, ahead of an EF4 tornado the "Enhanced Fujita" scale is based on the relative damage to structures, rating the tornadoes intensity with the greatest being an EF As Hargrove describes in his book, Samaras' probe got a direct hit, withstanding winds that roared like Niagra Falls.

The probe recorded a pressure drop of millibars, the largest ever seen inside a tornado. At the time, Gallus had been collaborating with Partha Sarkar, an engineer trying to develop structures that could better withstand tornadoes. To study twisters in detail, Sarkar and his colleagues built a tornado simulator , and believed Samaras' peek inside the twister was just what they needed to test the accuracy of their simulation.

Gallus approached his meeting with Samaras with great trepidation, fretting his engineering collaborators would be disappointed. But Samaras' visit whisked away all his worries.

Crucially, he could speak the language: "He was communicating with the engineers in engineer-ese. From that day on Samaras collaborated with Gallus and Sarkar, attempting to secure the data they so desired. With his team, Samaras captured stunning video from inside the tornado and pressure data from several successful deployments of the turtle probes. Samaras' work left an indelible mark on the meteorologic community. As Gallus notes, researchers really need direct measurements of wind speed—not just pressure—inside the whirling gales.

And as with all science, they need repetition of the measurements at multiple points through the storm and of tornadoes of different strengths. But Samaras at least proved it was possible—and important—to get these ground-based measurements.

Scientists are slowly making headway, Gallus says. For example, Josh Wurman, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, recently collected measurements that support existing computer models, which suggest the strongest winds are actually tens of feet above the ground, the optimum height for peeling roofs from houses.

But these measures were all from weak tornadoes, and they need similar data from storms of many strengths to say whether the pattern will hold, says Gallus. This work is becoming more important than ever, Hargrove writes.

Some studies suggests tornadoes may have become more intense in recent years. Though it's not easy to pin the trend on changes in climate, it's certainly a troubling possibility.