What inspired you to start chasing?

[Lorraine Evans]

Well we had a very bad storm here in 1987 that caused widespread devastation to the southern part of England. I was only 8 years old and can remember being terrified as my family tried to hold the window in our living room in place as 100 mph + winds buffeted it, forcing it to bow.
My fascination grew from then on as, although I had been petrified, it had amazed me. The sound was scary and I had been enthralled as I watched the clouds and how fast they had been moving across the sky as the storm moved away.
I also saw a funnel cloud a few years later
I think that the violence of that '87 storm spurred me on to find out more about how storms get that severe and of course I found out about tornado alley
Reading lots of books and eventually getting access to the internet, I discovered more and more and finally got the opportunity to storm chase....I have not looked back since! It is something so fundamentally part of me now that I just love to speak to and meet other people with that same passion.

 

[Bridget Beddow]

Fascinating Fear

When I was nine I was outside on a swing when my mother came out and told me she wanted me inside because there was a tornado warning. At that moment, we looked at a particular black cloud hanging low about 1 mile away and watched a tornado touch down. While I was visiting my parents one week in Selma, NC a couple of years ago, a tornado passed through town about 5 miles away. The next year I took a week off to visit my (now ex) fiancee and a tornado touched down about 1-2 miles away ruining one of the pivots on the farm. I've also been through Hugo in Selma, NC - Fran in Greenville, NC - Dennis (and a few others) in Pamlico County, NC - Isabel in Hubert, NC (Jacksonville - Home of the Marines). Had a few other close encounters where I just happened to turn around and go in another direction only to find out destruction occurred where I would have been - Now I want to watch it from the other end of the spectrum - a mile or so away where I'm just watching it and not dealing with it.

 

[Mike Peregrine]

We were a local chase family when I was a kid - both my dad and my grandmother enjoyed driving out to watch the storms. They taught me to both enjoy and respect the weather. After moving back to NW Missouri in the mid-90's and seeing a couple of tornadoes I started taking more of an active interest in learning and chasing. My brother chased more often than I did at that point, and I tended to me more timid. But after a few successful intercepts and learning more about how the storm operates, I just gradually got out there more and more. I doubt if I'll ever feel tired of doing it now ... it's too 'connected' with my past and my family, and feels like it's just part of who I am these days.

 

[mrobinson]

Pampa

Mel - Pampa was your first? :shock:
Nothing like baptism by fire I guess.

No kidding. My ex's little cousin was actually hit by a car so we were headed up there for the family stuff and funeral when we ran into the storm.. I was already chasing at that point although pretty locally but my mind was not on the weather that day until there was no choice but it be on the weather. Intense

 

[Bridget Beddow]

Family Chasing

I'm a little jazzed about my brother and sister right now. My brother saw a tornado touch down briefly in Selma about a month ago. I showed him one of the books I checked out from the library to start studying weather and for him to have sat there and read a book the way he was, I think he's peaked a little interest in the weather. I also started talking to my sister about taking pictures of storms because she took up photography in high school. As she was picking out her first courses for college, she decided to pick meteorology as her science. As smart as she is, she'll be teaching me everything before I know it - hehe

 

[Jamie Lahowetz]

I can remember at the age of 13, it was summer in my home town of Grand Island, NE. I remember seeing mushrooms clouds, anvils of thunderstorms but at that age i called them mushroom clouds, all around the city. They were all tens of miles away but i thought it was the coolest thing ever. Since then I wanted to study the weather. I wanted to know why these things got so massive. I had my first chase experience at the age of 17, although now i think it was a bad idea, i headed out to the east "chasing" a torn warned supercell with little to no experience or knowledge of what I was doing. Since then I did it on and off, i focused more on gaining knowledge about the processes of the atmosphere. This year I finally got out to seriously chase. Why? because I love weather and have the at most respect for it. Its as simple as that :wink:

 

[Bob Hartig]

I've had a "relationship" with tornadoes since I was around four years old, when my dad showed me a couple of classic tornado photos in an old Encyclopaedia Brittanica. The images and the concept just clicked inside me, and from that point on I was hooked.

A few years later, in 1965 (oh, man, I'm dating myself now!), my mom took me out to see the aftermath of the Dunlap/Sunnyside trailer park after the historic Palm Sunday Outbreak (my family lived in Niles, MI, at the time). I remember seeing a two-story house minus its roof, and maybe a quarter-mile further, a gas station wearing the missing roof...plus most of a trailer park roto-tilled. Unbelievable, and even at my young age, pretty horrifying.

Anyway, the obsession has been nearly lifelong, and I guess it was just inevitable that I'd start chasing. I began getting serious about it when I met a guy at a church I attended some years back who was as nuts about tornadoes as me, and who had chased the panhandle area with his brother. The two of them are now my chase partners. But my first--and only--successful chase was a solo chase back in 1997. I watched a wall cloud develop just south of my work place, and I followed the storm for maybe sixty miles till it put down a weak, brief, but beautiful tube.

Then on the way back home, a deer leaped out in front of my Nissan Sentra and bonded with my radiator. So right there you can see just how dangerous stormchasing can be. (I've always said I'd like to see a deer from a distance, but not up close.) :tongue1:

 

[Brian Brubaker]

I can't point to any one thing, but an accumulation of events.

When I was 3 or 4, I have memories of going to our cellar while a tornado lifted, went over our house, then dropped again. I guess that event planted the seeds.

I always got a rush of adrenaline when severe weather approached.

Age 19, driving home after dark during a storm and hearing over the radio that a tornado was spotted 2-3 miles from where I was at.

Coverage of the Hesston and Andover tornadoes back in the early 90s.

Seeing 'Twister'. It certainly was not the deciding factor, but it didn't hurt, either!

The day after the OKC/Wichita tornadoes, a tornado hit the small town where I live while I was home for lunch. I had retreated to the basement, listening to the local spotters describe the movement (which sounded like it was headed for my house), and I could hear the wind as it passed just a block and a half away. It ended up tearing the roof off of a duplex that on one side lived some friends from my Sunday-school class, and on the other side lived a co-worker (who weeks later ended up buying my house).

I had never actually seen a tornado and that last event finally gave me the desire to start chasing.

 

[James McCormick]

I chase for two main reasons on any given day, and a third on severe weather days.

The first is that God has always laid some serious stuff on my heart when I am out watching thunderstorms. I think it is just the time by myself or with good friends to get rid of a lot of the junk off of my mind and start focusing on what God has really given me and what is really important. It doesn't matter if it is a high risk, loaded gun tornado day or if it is just a generic thunderstorm day. Some of His best stuff comes to me under generic thunderstorms that have no hail.

I am also utterly obsessed with knowing as much as possible about what the atmosphere is doing. Our atmosphere is so powerful and so strong that doppler radars, surface maps, and satellite images don't do it any justice. Feeling a 40 MPH inflow wind blasting up against your face with a black bear cage to your north, or seeing an updraft blast through the cap and trying to use the CAPE/vertical motion equation to figure out just how fast that three-dimensional fluid system is moving is just amazing.

On severe weather days, I have a third purpose to be out. It is nice to get as much info to the weather service as I can about a storm and to get info about a wall cloud. Radar images just don't cut it on initial low level rotation. There is only so much they know out in the office, so getting into in is something I take as an obligation.

 

[Jordan Manderfield]

What inspired me to chase with my dad of course since I'm probably the youngest one on here lol-

It was around late March in 1998 it was very humid out as I remember and I was eight years old at the time....and a huge cell was developing in sw minnesota and the morning before this we saw a car with lots of stuff on it well thats what I called it "stuff" but it was really a storm chaser and I really didnt know what a storm chaser was so my dad explained to me that storm chasers trys to catch up to storms and/or forecast them then go out and see tornadoes and report them to the weather place lol nice explanation :roll: well anyways I said I'm gonna be a storm chasers someday and well I'm pretty much here now well almost

Anyways later in the evening a huge supercell spawned massive tornadoes an F4 in comfery and a F3 in st. Peter both about 15 miles away from mankato my dad and I were looking out the window and saw the clouds a swirling!! This tornado destroyed the town of St. Peter completly

Ever since that day my dad and I have gone chasing to many times to count and my mom calls us :shock: weather nuts :shock: