Predictions of the future of chasing

[Dan Robinson]

I had a thought last night about what the next 10, 20 or even 50 years might hold for storm chasing. I figured it would make an interesting topic.

I think the most significant development will be with short-term models. By 2025, these may improve to the point of making most chase forecasting tasks a relic of the past. By 2035, the initiation point and track of supercells may be known in advance with a high degree of confidence. By 2020, 4K video will be the standard. In 2030, 8K will be the norm. By 2017, most chasers will be operating a camera on a radio-controlled multirotor aircraft. By 2025, fuel expenses could triple.

The implications of all of this? With no prior experience needed to see a tornado aside from the ability to read short-term model output, by 2035, chaser crowds along the track of tornadic supercells in the Great Plains will routinely surpass critical mass. Eventually, authorities in some counties (or states) will begin evacuating residents and closing roads leading to where the storms are expected to pass. In 2045, views of tornadoes within 2 miles could be limited to pre-approved individuals or groups such as spotters and EMS personnel. As a consequence, the focus of more traditional storm chasing may shift outside of the Great Plains in the spring. Chasers will increasingly make forays into other regions and times of year where the 'regulation' of travel inside model-forecasted supercell tracks is less stringent.

What do you think? What will the next 2 generations of new chasers be like? Will the activity continue to grow, or will it fade back into obscurity? Will storm chasing resembling anything we know still be around in 2060 and beyond?

 

[James Gustina]

I see it fading back into obscurity honestly. I'd argue that the closer and closer that people have gotten over the years has actually helped in removing the "final frontier" of chasing. You can't really get much closer or do much else that someone else hasn't already done and that will probably at least see a decent downsizing in the number of new people who come into the hobby simply because there just isn't anything "new" or "daring" to do with chasing for them. I do agree that the hi-res modeling that should come out of the next 10 to 15 years is going to be revolutionary, but I'm unsure if it'll be far enough along to completely eradicate the in-depth targeting forecasts done by most chasers. We're making leaps and bounds in our understanding of the atmosphere, but I don't think a computer will be able to replicate the intelligence that a human forecaster has.

The advances in the technology chasers use I agree will probably be insane over the next 20 years, but I don't think we'll have the ability to nail the track of a supercell by then. We're still getting outwitted on occasion by the atmosphere which leads me to think that we're not as close as we think we are to unlocking all the secrets of tornadic thunderstorms.

It'll be interesting to see how tech savvy the next generation of chasers is, because that will definitely have an effect on what storm chasing will be 50 years from now. Improvements in road systems and broadband coverage will definitely make chasing a smidge easier. I think (well hope would be a better word) that storm chasing maintains as it has been for the past 60 years and continues to actually be a challenge. It would take a decent amount of fun out of it for me if I didn't have to work for anything. I do think that the next group of chasers that come into the hobby will make some changes to tactics based on newer technology, but I do believe that the traditional brand of chasing will maintain with a lot of us who started in the 2000s and earlier.

 

[Jeremy Perez]

I don't have any sense for how well forecasting to individual storms would become. But I think the video-res, RC, and fuel cost estimates Dan mentioned sound about right. I'm pretty interested to see what chasers end up doing with advancing quadcopter/drone capabilities. I imagine increasingly robust models with greater power, battery strength/life, enhanced on-board processing for station-keeping or trimming against strong inflow/outflow...could be developed to help overcome the challenges of the near-storm environment. I imagine some pretty impressive views coming out of that. A lot like Skip in a plane, but less barfing and also more options under the meso. It would also bring, of course, the intense drama of challenges with the FAA, 400 ft. ceiling issues or whatever, and flying/crashing over private property, etc. I won't have the bonus bucks for such a thing, but can't wait to see what others do.

 

[Michael Gavan]

In my opinion, there won't be nearly the advances in short term forecasting. Or at least my timeline isn't so aggressive.

Like HD, 4k and 8k video for example, you begin to have diminished returns for what is being put into it. Let me explain. If the lens through which you record the video for example is only capable of producing X amounts of light, resolution, etc to the sensor. You might end up with an 8K video, and yet not 8x as much detail. Perhaps at 4k, the limitations already show up. The purple frindge affect on the GoPro at 4k is obvious enough. In order to record a better image, you need a better medium...Typically a larger piece of glass to really utilize it.

One of my hobbies is astrophotography. For about $3000 you can produce some truly awe inspiring 10 megapixel wide-field images of the heavens. At a certain point, resolution is good, but it begins to have diminished returns unless you get a better telescope. Bigger, better telescopes have diminished returns until you get a better mount that can support the weight. Tracking error limits your ability to peer deeper or for longer... Then the Atmosphere becomes a limiting factor. Actually all of these are already limiting factors but are at least manageable. At this point, in order to produce an image 2x as good as what I can do for $3000, you will need to spend 10x as much. 4x better? 100x as much and so on. But it isn't just cost, but also complexity. I don't want to operate that kind of a telescope in my backyard. It would be better on a mountain top in Chile! 8x better? Now the setup needs to be in space, and it will cost billions. In the meantime, over the course of decades, technologies improve this curve. It's been said that images today by amatuers rival those of when the 2.5 billion dollar Hubble telescope was lofted. So that's 20 years. Meanwhile, the cost of Hubble's successor is running to $9 billion, has taken 10 years to build, and it isn't even flying yet. What it does tell us is that large scale, time unconstrained, volunteer efforts eventually produce results on par with giant, monolithic, hypercost systems. The cool thing is you don't have to pay more taxes for the former to be effective either.

Then there's the value of the video from 4k or 8k. A 70" TV at 1080p perhaps looks a little bit pixelated, but up to that point, it's PLENTY. So when talking 4k, I imagine the flexibility of being able to crop the video or eliminate camera shake. Meanwhile, what I really want from a sensor is full spectral analysis...Low light capability...smoother grain....Higher FPS, Better stability, better durability and so on. All of those have huge value and a high ceiling for improvement.

Same thing goes for forecasting, I don't think we will see this kind of ground level nowcasting that you are speaking of for perhaps 100 years or more. Perhaps in 20 years, we will be seeing supercell generation leading to a tornado, good for 40 minute lead times or maybe an hour. But imagine warning a public about a tornado while they are standing under a blue sky? Getting someone to evacuate ahead of a hurricane is one thing...but scale that down to something as wide as a parking lot with winds only strong enough to mess up your backyard furniture, or as wide as a mile and strong enough to pulverize a car into dust. and neither follow a linear predictable path at that scale. Certainly a small change miles away can affect the track of a needle tornado. Or what about small scale features such as a jet contrail or a small valley or a single corn field causing enough small changes to a storm's development....How do you maintain and collect data like that? You would need an amazing amount of real time input. What's the cost of a metar every single mile or better? Or weather baloons? etc.

Here's what I see.... Our arsenal of airliners being used as weather data collection devices. Cars and houses reporting real time surface data. It would be a cloud based volunteer network of data. In 20 years we could be sampling the entire atmosphere over a continent every second, 24 hours a day. This would have implications for chasers and spotters as well. And the cost....relatively small.

Another big improvement we'll see in 20 years is radar density, resolution (both Temporal and spatial) , especially in Tornado Alley and over the populated eastern US. If we want better warnings, and less warning 'fatigue' when need to consistently see under 1000 feet.

Chasers? I expect the number to be flat or even fall off for a while. At some point youtube will be full of tornado videos and everyone and their mother taking videos of them. (oh wait that's where we are) Ultimately it just isn't that "cool" anymore to the lay person who wants to join the club called anyone. There's nothing we haven't seen. For those of us that really truly enjoy driving aimlessly for hours to chaser conventions to watch water vapor spin up and destroy our cars with falling ice, nothing will change for us...but the "yahoos" will be off doing something else.

I feel that what drove more people out in the plains in the last decade wasn't so much TV shows and hype (It was part of it) but the advent of the smart phone and internet data in the car. I would have been a chaser in the 1990's if I didn't have to figure out how to get a forecast or just simply a radar scan. yet at the same time, Warnings were only slightly worse, and forecast was just slightly more difficult at the NWS level. The difference is that this data is in my lap, in my car, while I'm in the middle of an open field in western Kansas.


In short, Better radar, better surface obs = better forecasts, chaser convergence has peaked.

 

[Sean Ramsey]

10 years: Touch screen Internet is an integral part of all vehicles, removing the need for laptops or tablets. NWS further improves its forecasting, reducing it's risk area by 50% in most cases on Day one releases. Drones are employed to monitor incoming storms. Chasing stays at current levels in popularity, and the national media has a bigger presence on scene. Stormtrack is still frequented by core members as it is today.

30 years: Younger crowds move on to other hobbies, older chasers (today's 20-30 year olds) are still out on the roads. Construction of tornado resistant buildings is affordable, causing less damage and lessening the media coverage, which is why there is waning interest. Forecasting is further refined, down to a finite area with plenty of lead time for evacuations if necessary.

50 years: Science figures out a way to prevent a key ingredient for severe storms, so there is nothing to chase. The plains become a popular place to live to get away from over population and traffic problems increase everywhere.

But then again, I'm not good at predictions as my NCAA bracket could attest.

 

[Skip Talbot]

I'm going to agree with others and say that chasing is at least temporarily stabilizing or even beginning to wane in popularity. I think Discovery's Storm Chasers getting canceled was the canary in the coal mine that the storm chasing fad bubble has popped. I've noticed LESS storm chasers in certain situations than I have in previous years. If there's a fast growing area of chasing, it's the local smartphone chaser crowd. You'll see bigger hoards by the populated areas, but out in remote areas, there are days where I don't see any other chasers at all.

I think the original predictions might be a little too optimistic, 1950's World of Tomorrow type shows featuring everyone having flying cars by 1980. We barely even understand how tornadoes work, or know why some supercells produce tornadoes and other don't. I'm very skeptical we'll have bleachers being setup for the tornado show in 30 or even 50 years from now, let alone ways to combat them.

Even if numerical modeling starts plotting individual tornado tracks with accuracy, there's still going to be fun and challenge in chasing. Photography challenges will remain. Getting the right angle and lighting on the tornado. Composing your shots. Forecasting which shows will be the most enjoyable will remain, even if it's known ahead when and where they'll be. At worst, storm chasing is going to turn into something like a weekend road trip to a national park or become something like landscape photography. It'll be quite different than today's Lewis and Clark expeditions or frontier gold rush, but it will still be relevant and enjoyed by many. Those days are still a long ways off, more than 50 years from now.

Quadcopters are pretty cool, but are they going to be the dominant camera platform in 3 years? Or ever? I don't think I've even seen good tornado footage from one yet. Some probably exists, but I missed it. Unless you're parking it a few miles from the base, I don't know how a small rotorcraft is going to be able to handle golfball or larger hail or 50 mph winds. They seem like a neat gadget that I'm sure many more chasers will experiment with, but not something that's going to become a dominant fixture.

The immediate and obvious changes are going to include a transition to smaller screens and less equipment needed for chasing, which will open the door for more casual and local chasers (again more congestion near populated areas). A big boon for chasers that I see coming up in the next few decades are self driving cars. Probably not on Bob's road, but being able to overnight it to the target while sleeping is going to be a huge advantage.

 

[James Gustina]

I'm going to agree with others and say that chasing is at least temporarily stabilizing or even beginning to wane in popularity. I think Discovery's Storm Chasers getting canceled was the canary in the coal mine that the storm chasing fad bubble has popped. I've noticed LESS storm chasers in certain situations than I have in previous years. If there's a fast growing area of chasing, it's the local smartphone chaser crowd. You'll see bigger hoards by the populated areas, but out in remote areas, there are days where I don't see any other chasers at all.

This * 1000. Slight risk days away from central Oklahoma (removes almost the entire OU crowd) and the DFW metroplex have seemed a lot less congested the past two years. Last week on the 15th proved it for me, I didn't see another chaser on a major US highway ahead of a storm for the first time in a very long time. There just aren't as many smartphone "chasers" that have made it outside of the major population centers because they have trouble seeing the forest for the trees when it comes to forecasting. If it's a giant tornadic supercell within 10 miles of the city, you can bet everyone and their mother will be on it. But the lower-end days up in far western KS/TX Panhandle/Nebraska is starting to be made up of almost exclusively "dedicated" recreational chasers again. Add in the fact that locals/yahoos don't have massive armadas of marked vehicles (looking at you V2) to follow anymore and there aren't TV specials every other week and it'd seem that interest in chasing is finally falling off and pretty rapidly at that.

One more thing on the whole final frontier deal, now that we've had multiple people go inside tornadoes and confirm the fact that it's just a giant rotating cloud with nothing that cool to see from the inside, it just seems like people don't care anymore. In short, it's not trendy to be a storm chaser anymore.

 

[Conner Tune]

Let's all just hope that an asteroid doesn't collide with the earth any time soon, because I'm pretty sure that that would make getting an atmospheric setup favorable for severe thunderstorms here in the plains even harder than it's been this March.

....... Also, we should probably try to avoid thermonuclear war and runaway global warming.....

 

[Stan Rose]

I think chasing will become boring, as skip said, 'like landscape photography' (and as a photog--im cool with that!) when a major architectural revolution (or possibly medical technology) renders EF-5 tornado impacts completely harmless--once the tornado is no longer seen as dangerous, it will lose its intrigue (but not its aesthetic qualities).

 

[Dave Gallaher]

The insurance cartel commences industrial tracking of individuals and their vehicles. They initiate a significant surcharge for every trip within 5 miles of a severe storm. In the case of chaser death or injury, individual life and medical coverage providers importune a 'self-inflicted' clause allowing them to deny death benefits and payment for medical care. Repeated incidents of closure with severe storms result in cancellation of all insurance - including life, fire, theft, home and finance - with prevention of repurchase through another company.

Employers are advised by insurers regarding individuals who are 'requisite risk-takers'. Banks (embedded insurers) freeze/seize assets of those determined 'likely to skew the actuarial risk pool' of the insured population. The incarceration industry (bank-owned) intakes UC's (Uncovereds) in partial replacement of the previous resource stream of nonviolent detainees, drug users.

Through the efforts of the bank/insurance/incarceration lobby: tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, and floods are declared to be Natural National Assets. Non-media visual access to NNA's is allocated only to upscale Covereds who are willing to pay additional premium surcharges to help offset insurance payouts to authenticated, non-deliberate victims. In place of claims reduction, authenticated victims are entered into a lottery system that determines which 45% of Covereds receive partial reimbursement of losses, with one Grand Indemnitee receiving 100% plus Free Lifetime Coverage.

 

[Brett Roberts]

I'm not even going to get into technological advances (at least in this post), but want to focus on the popularity and prevalence of chasing. I don't know if I agree that its popularity has peaked, or that its numbers have waned in recent years. Unfortunately, there's virtually no hard data on this topic, so all we can do is speculate and relate anecdotes.

A couple posts above mentioned that numbers have recently dropped off in remote areas far from population centers. Personally, I've noticed no change between my early days (2006-2008) and the past couple years significant enough to mention. For example, on days like Rozel and Bennington last year, the crowds seemed relatively similar to what I've seen on comparable days all along. In the bubble of the chase community and social media chasing circles, it seems there are more hardcore, "never stop chasing" people than ever before. It's possible, though, that the distribution of chasers has changed and that the more casual contingent isn't growing as fast as it was 3-6 years ago. The number of hardcore chasers willing to drive through states for relatively low-end setups is still large enough to cause major congestion on concentrated-target days, regardless. Numbers on the last hugely-advertised Plains day, 4/14/12, were staggering, but there were enough storms to keep things barely manageable.

Speculating on future trends: very difficult to do with anything near certainty, but I just can't envision the actual number of chasers waning with time, as much as I wish it would. At best, I can see the rate of growth slowing down significantly. Better and cheaper technology is just making it too easy and convenient for anyone with a passing interest to partake. Young as I am, I still feel there's been a sea change since I started in 2006: ubiquitous smartphones mean you don't have to spend $80/mo. plus buy expensive equipment to have good onboard data, and the HRRR has rendered positioning/decision-making on the timescale of 1-6 hours significantly easier. The barriers to entry are already incredibly low, and will soon be reduced to virtually nothing when vehicles come with integrated Internet-connected touchscreens from the factory. Only a decreasing public interest in storms can mitigate the numbers, and let's face it: Plains storms are just too awe-inspiring for that to happen.

Don't get me wrong, though: I'd be delighted if Skip, James and Stan are correct.

 

[Paul Knightley]

As Skip mentioned above, previous predictions from soothsayers about how we might be living now are pretty far from the truth: we still drive cars powered by fossil fuels, (even if not at the point of delivery), we still watch TV, we don't eat much freeze dried food, we don't have replicators (!), etc.

One change will be away from fully petrol-powered cars into hybrids, making your MPG much better. A self driving car fitted with in-car radar, and an algorithm which recognises the 'best' part of the storm and drives you there would be nice!

Radar will get much better - perhaps with shorter-range radar stations positioned much more frequently across the Plains - this data will feed into ensemble short-range, rapid update models, which may increase lead times on potentially tornadic storms.

One thing which won't change is the feeling of standing before a tornadic supercell, feeling the inflow at your back, and marvelling at nature. I don't expect weather modification any time soon - the supercell is there for a reason, and if you could prevent it from forming, that's just more convective and kinematic energy which the atmosphere 'needs' to get rid of, which it will do in some other fashion.

 

[Rob H]

In the future, people will overcome their prejudice, and we'll see the first Chaser-American president. He/she will order an artificial mountain range and Palmer Divide-like feature created in Eastern Nebraska called "South Moronville" to the tune of several billion dollars. Iowa will become the new hotspot due to changes in the climate, the upslope conditions created by South Moronville, and the permanent magma crater in Missouri created by the alien attacks of 2034.

We'll eventually have robots doing all the chasing for us. Cyborg chasers and "normies" (unaltered humans) will be at a disadvantage, as WSR20D data will flow directly into the robot's neural processing channels and be unrestricted by organic neural bandwidth limitations. Some chasers will elect to have radar installed in their craniums leading to chaserphobic slurs such as "tor-brain" becoming part of the national lexicon.

Chasers will argue about lightbars for their hover-tanks.

 

[Brandon Jenkins]

I think we need April (perhaps May?) to get here just a little bit faster...

 

[Matt Hunt]

The thing I'd like to see is a radar that can complete a scan every minute as the standard. I think that's not only useful to chasers, but also to real-time warnings for the public. So much can change in a storm in 5 minutes, it's really too long to wait for the next scan. I don't think this will happen for maybe 20-30 years, though. Cost will be the biggest limiting factor.

I agree with others that the popularity of chasing will begin to wane. El Reno likely opened some eyes of the true amateurs, who may now think it's not worth it. And of course no more Storm Chasers on TV means less people get the idea in the first place.