STORMCHASERS
A trek into the Great Plains to hunt nature's most elusive predator |
By Jenna Blum
OH, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL EVENING it is in the Oklahoma Panhandle, five miles west of Guymon. The sunset blazes orange, cattle graze on yucca flowers, prairie grasses wave serenely toward the horizon.
At least, on one side of Highway 412.
On the other, a massive Supercell thunderstorm rotates low over the land.
Black and purple, with a bright green heart of softball-sized hail, the circular
storm bears uncanny resemblance to an Independence Day spaceship. Vans,
Doppler-radar trucks, and emergency vehicles zoom along its periphery like ants
rimming a giant carousel.
On the storm’s underbelly, ragged clouds start twisting into a drill bit. Over the CB, on “chaser channel” 146.520 MhZ, meteorologist “Dr. Bob” Conzemius tells four vans of hopeful listeners, “It’s reorganizing.”
Sure enough, the drill bit elongates into a crooked finger pointing toward the ground. All along 412 breath is collectively held. If that snaky green funnel touches down, it’ll become the Great Plains’ most feared and destructive weather phenomenon: a tornado.
Precisely what the clients of Texas-based stormchase company Tempest Tours have traveled 5 days and almost 3000 miles to see.
THE 2000 GLOSSARY OF METEOROLOGY defines a tornado as “a violently rotating column of air…pendant from cloud to ground.” The weakest twister boasts 85 mph winds; the strongest is a 250+ mph blender that liquefies everything in its path—for instance, Greensburg, KS, on May 5, 2007.
Who would willingly seek out these vicious vortices? As Helen Hunt said in the 1996 movie Twister, “Who are these people?”
First you have your experts: there are approximately 200 professional stormchasers in the US, 5 of them leading Tempest’s 2007 Memorial Day Tour. In the off-season, the Tempest boys hail from Pennsylvania to California and range from cabinet salesman to wind specialist. Kinney Adams is a Wisconsin videographer, Keith Brown an insurance analyst from Chicago; tour director and 7-year Tempest veteran Bill Reid is a grocery-store clerk and LAX weather spotter in his other life. What do these men share? In most cases, a meteorology degree—and in all, an extreme love of extreme weather. Every storm season, from May-July, they’re tooling the Plains, guiding one of Tempest’s 7 tours or chasing solo during downtime.
Then there are Tempest’s clients, civilians willing to pay $1895-$2550 per
tornado safari. There are 19 guests on this excursion—Tempest’s largest
ever; most average 6-11 clients—and, not surprisingly, most of us converging on
Oklahoma City’s Wingate Inn for orientation are “weather weenies,” myself
included. I’ve been tornado-obsessed since childhood, when I saw one in my
grandmother’s farm town. Tour photographer Marcia Perez shoots severe
storms from her native Dallas. Rochester, MN resident and Wizard of Oz
fanatic Leisa Luis-Grill requested this trip for her 50th birthday. West
Virginian Doug Nichols is a SKYWARN spotter.
But 8 clients come from storm-starved Britain and the Netherlands. How did they get hooked? “A Discovery Channel documentary on freak weather,” says Peter Playford, a spry sixty-something Londoner.
“I’ve been waiting 10 years, since Twister,” adds James Connor from Manchester, UK.
“I have no interest in any of this,” says his aunt Melanie Connor. “I stupidly promised I’d take James for his 18th birthday.”
Californian Stacy Williams wins for most creative motivation: “I just like riding in vans with strangers.”
Lucky for Stacy, because as Bill explains, tornadoes are elusive beasts, and
hunting them is more chess than chasing. He projects the US government’s
Storm Prediction Center website on the wall to highlight necessary ingredients
for “tornadogenesis”: warm and cold air colliding, moisture, wind shear to
induce rotation—and an X factor not even top scientists understand. One
Supercell may spawn a twister while another, containing all the same elements,
might not. Of about 1200 tornadoes that do touch down annually in the US,
most occur over rural areas and last about 30 seconds. And this can happen
anywhere in Tornado Alley, from Texas to North Dakota. Essentially we’re
embarking on an expensive gamble. Tempest president
Martin Lisius says Tempest clients typically see tornadoes every 5 of 6 tours
and almost always see Supercells. But our tour could travel 500 miles a
day to intercept a promising storm—without, as Tempest emphatically emphasizes,
any tornadic guarantees.
“Stormchasing involves a lot of patience, a lot of waiting and long hours of driving,” affirms guide Brian Morganti..
In other words, a lot of riding in vans with strangers.
