With whatever attitude new chasers take - and yes, I am one of them - they will need to be informed that they should NOT do what I did and attempt to chase a storm without sufficient knowledge. Even though I'd been studying nonstop for a few weeks in June, my happily running out to my car during a tornado warning for my county was not a good idea. Even though I had enough sense back then to wait for the little graphic on my computer to go far enough, the one chaser and two state police cars trailing after that storm were chance, and who knows? I might've found myself alone too close to an EF-5 instead of a wall cloud that fell apart, and then splat.
Not something I'd recommend. To anyone.
As for Twister, I've never seen it. As for the Outlaws, I heard of them for the first time when Reed and Joel put the notice up on their website. As for Reed and Joel themselves, I only came to know them when I put the word "tornado" into the Youtube search engine and found they had the biggest stack. But in all fairness, I've only seen their stuff in proportion to how much is on Youtube - I've seen every tornado on there that I can find, most at least twice-over, and I know tons of other respected names.
But in the beginning of this desire, none of THOSE big names even mattered. It was Greensburg and Florida that hit me, because the devastation reminded me so much of my hometown when I was but a wee lad in Wichita Falls, 1979. I've always had the dream inside of me to "chase." I'm both fascinated with the power of these storms and, on and off since before I could even drive, very much interested in the prospect of preventing as much as I can in another town what happened in mine. We lost nothing more than our front window, but a satellite took out the other side of my small street, and even seriously damaged houses close enough for even Cleo Lemon to throw a football at.
My family lost friends and people they knew. They had many more injured. My grandmother's house was totally destroyed. My babysitter's house was totally destroyed. Common friends between all of our families were killed or wounded. The scar wasn't even a scar for a long time in Wichita falls - it was an open sore, no matter how much we tried to bandage it.
For me, it was something long before Twister - a movie I've never disgraced my town by seeing (I've only seen one silly clip on Youtube while tornado video hunting, where Helen Hunt and some guy were trapped in a shed and a big tornado created this huge, supposedly moving moment where they had to hang on dramatically to stuff; I laughed). It was a tenth anniversary on Channel Six News, and a tenth anniversary packet I obsessed over through my teenage years.
It's always been in me, but for a long time - blocking the brief temptation to do it after OKC in 99 - I believed I was not "savvy" enough to cover storms. Mislead by the popular conception that meteorologists were always people who stood in front of a camera like Skip McBride, I gave up my long-term dream to become one because I had low self-confidence and thought nobody would listen to me, so I took my penchant for math away from the dream of meteorology and toward my current career: just plain old pure mathematics.
I've long since recovered my proto-emo sense of self from high school, but I knew there was still a major issue with the idea of the secondary choice I have now to storm chase: maturity. Namely, until recently, I dismissed the idea because I knew I was doing no more than browsing some old stories - I was not mature enough to dedicate myself to studying the topic sufficiently to not put my life (and the lives of anyone else with me) at risk.
It was when I graduated with my Masters and moved here to Ames that I recognized I'd finally grown up in an academic sense. Like I said in a previous post today, I was wide awake in the middle of the night when the tornadoes in Florida happened in early February of last year - and I thought "now, if I was in Florida and a chaser, I could have possibly prevented many of those deaths." But I knew it would take some serious study, so I sat on it until Greensburg put me over the edge with its sheer similarity to Terrible Tuesday, from the twister on down to the destruction and inevitable scars that community will face, just like Wichita Falls has faced for nearly thirty years.
I awakened. I'm on a mission. When I started reading articles, I tried to avoid temptation to delve into the lore and the mechanics, a "mistake" I even committed today when I lost myself for about twenty minutes on a paper posted here that I can't find anymore for some reason, because of my interest in vector fields and numerical modeling. But I continued to jump past "good video history" and "tornado history" and all of that as much as I could, and focused instead on the videos themselves and the articles themselves.
Before I happened on this board today through a recommendation from a friend of Reed Timmer, I couldn't locate a storm community, but until recently I didn't search hard, because I knew I hadn't yet done enough work to start reasonable communication with experts. I'm nowhere near "expert" by any sort of means, but I think it's necessary to educate oneself before anything, to first check dedication and then to know what questions are relevant to your needs and what questions aren't.
Will I continue to be fascinated by "lore" and "history" of the chaser community? Yes. I've watched those favorite videos I listed earlier many times, and the bigger percentage was for aesthetics rather than study. And with regards to study, will I continue to be interested in mathematical and statistical models irrelevant to both basic storm chasing knowledge and my own area of mathematical research? Yes. It's in my blood. But I know now that I have control enough to filter through my emotions and learn well what I need to learn come March to be safe.
While my own faults are certainly there, this is something that, in general, must be pushed to newbies such as myself: MOAR EDUCATION. I'm a teacher by trade, so that and my newly gained discipline to stick by my learning have helped.
For some who are new, who are out there looking for a thrill as an end in itself and not a fantastic by-product of their real goals (if any), the idea of education-or-else must be highlighted. Having a few guys and gals smarter than I in the Iowa area could help fill in a gap I've perceived as pretty wide between here and Kansas, Oklahoma, or my own home area in North Texas.
