The Real Danger of Storm Chasing from Meteorologist Dan Henry

The following is adapted from Menacing Skies by Dan Henry.

Hollywood films tend to portray storm chasers as thrill-seekers and adrenaline junkies who throw caution to the wind as they barrel down country roads while dodging flying debris in order to capture the “money shot” of a tornado in all its glory.

The vast majority of storm chasers strive to put their safety first.

Over the years, we have been extremely fortunate to have several dedicated, experienced chasers, who have logged thousands of miles on nearly every farm-to-market road from Waco to Wichita Falls.

These volunteers put themselves in harm’s way to get eyes on the storm and provide us with critical, up-to-the-minute reports.

Many of them regularly attend chaser conferences and National Weather Service Skywarn Spotter Training sessions to learn about the fundamentals of storm structure, how to identify potential severe weather features, and how to report information to local NWS offices.

Skywarn training sessions are geared toward “volunteer spotters,” citizens who intend not to chase but rather to report on weather conditions from their residence or place of business.

Storm chasers and spotters play a vital role in the process of warning the public of potentially dangerous weather. The only way to be 100% certain that a tornado is on the ground is to have eyes on it.

A well-trained spotter can provide critical information in real-time, such as hail size, wind speed, and direction estimates, whether a wall cloud is rotating and if a condensation funnel has formed, and the size of the tornado and any damage it may have produced.

When issuing warnings, NWS meteorologists can then use more descriptive language, such as “trained spotters report a large cone tornado with debris” to add veracity and prompt citizens to take swift, lifesaving actions.

THE INHERENT DANGER OF CHASING

Storm chasing carries an element of risk. Tornadic storms often display unpredictable motion, with sudden twists, turns, and acceleration. Maps and GPS may give you confidence that a road will lead you to safety, but storm chaser Hank Schyma, better known as Pecos Hank, advises that unforeseen hazards and escape route entrapments can arise.

“[Maps and gps] can’t predict flooded roads, that a stalled one-hundred-coach train may be blocking your retreat, when a bridge is out, when fallen trees are blocking your path, or a random deep pothole…anxious to tear your wheel off its axle.”

Unfortunately, there are some who choose to tempt fate by punching through the angry belly of intense storms. “Core-punching” involves driving through the core of the heaviest rain and largest hail to get to a better storm-viewing location.

This dangerous act may subject storm chasers to near-zero visibility in blinding sheets of rain and a pummeling by hail the size of baseballs. If they emerge safely on the other side of the storm, they may find themselves in the direct path of a tornado.

Most responsible chasers will not attempt stunts like this.

Instead, they formulate a plan for the day, beginning by thoroughly analyzing the weather data to determine where storms may initiate and how things may unfold. On active days, they will likely chase with at least one other person in the vehicle, who will navigate and monitor the storms on radar, although even the best-laid plans can be foiled, as weather conditions can change suddenly and deteriorate rapidly.

The combination of these elements and a highly anticipated severe-weather event that draws hundreds of trained chasers and wannabe chasers from all over the country can create epic log jams on two-lane country roads and be a recipe for disaster.

Sadly, this happened on May 31, 2013, in El Reno, Oklahoma.

Veteran storm chaser Tim Marshall describes the storm as wildly unpredictable: “Sometimes storms will grow much larger, turn in a different direction or accelerate. This one did all of that.”

The National Weather Service office in Norman, Oklahoma, produced an excellent video that chronicles the life cycle of the most dangerous tornado in storm-observing history and the lessons learned that deadly day in El Reno.

The El Reno tornado was an exceptionally large (2.6 miles wide), violent tornado with several intense sub-vortices moving erratically at blistering speeds around the main circulation. The main tornado was also moving in a highly unpredictable manner.

It changed direction multiple times, looped at least once, and at times was nearly stationary and would then accelerate to speeds of up to fifty-five miles an hour. On top of this, a smaller but powerful 150-mile-an-hour anticyclonic (clockwise-spinning) tornado had formed five miles away.

To make matters even more complicated, the tornado was rain-wrapped at times and suddenly grew much larger with fierce winds extending well beyond the visible condensation funnel.

Many storm chasers were caught completely off guard and found themselves in an impossible situation that forced them to abandon the chase and flee for their lives. Four chasers perished, including members of the Twistex research team led by legendary chaser Tim Samaras, along with his son Paul and his chase partner, Carl Young.

Their deaths stunned and deeply saddened the entire storm-chasing community.

Tim Samaras was a seasoned, savvy chaser with twenty-five years of experience pursuing storms. He often trekked twenty-five thousand miles in a year for his research.

Tim was a talented electrical engineer who helped build a model of the center wing tank to determine what had led to the crash of TWA Flight 800 and worked on classified technology to detect suicide bombers for the Department of Homeland Security.

But Tim’s true passion was chasing tornadoes in an effort to take groundbreaking measurements of near-surface winds and atmospheric pressure inside one of them. To do this, he built sophisticated probes that he called “turtles,” which were six-inch-tall conical weather stations encased in steel that he would attempt to drop in the path of an oncoming tornado.

For decades, teams of scientists had tried to do something similar but had failed. Tim, however, had an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time and made several successful deployments that resulted in direct hits to his probes.

Tim made history in 2003 when one of his probes scored a direct hit from an f4 tornado in Manchester, South Dakota, and was successful in measuring a 100 MB pressure drop.

In a 2005 interview I conducted with Tim for Fox 4 News, he described the accomplishment: “We knew we had a direct hit and when we looked at the data and saw a 100 MB pressure drop, we were just flabbergasted. It’s like stepping into an elevator and shooting yourself up 1,000' in ten seconds and then your ears pop. That’s the kind of pressure change we are talking about.”

Tim, though driven and passionate about his work, was not known as a daredevil. In fact, there were many times he refused to deploy his probes because doing so would have been too dangerous.

Video from storm chaser Dan Robinson’s rear-facing dash camera captured the last images of Tim’s car disappearing behind heavy curtains of windswept rain. The car’s occupants likely could not escape the powerful storm inflow that was generating a sixty- to eighty-mile-an-hour headwind, particularly considering they were in a small four-cylinder Chevy Cobalt loaded with three passengers and heavy equipment.

The Twistex crew, among others, probably misjudged the size of the tornadic wind field, which expanded rapidly and cut off their escape route. Josh Wurman, who operates a fleet of mobile radars for his Center for Severe Weather Research, was scanning the immense tornado.

High-resolution data from his Doppler on wheels indicated that one of the satellite vortices, traveling at an incredible 176 miles an hour, struck Tim’s vehicle and threw it nearly 2,000'. A larger Weather Channel chase vehicle was also overtaken by an intense sub-vortex, rolled, and flattened, but amazingly, all of its occupants survived.

Tim Marshall was only one mile northeast of Samaras and his group and was one of many chasers who were extremely fortunate to escape the massive, deadly twister.

He says El Reno was a wake-up call for chasers: “Tornadoes are erratic. You have to anticipate and think ahead. There are certain situations you simply have to abort. Back out and live to chase another day.”

For more on severe storms and weather, you can find Menacing Skies on Amazon.

DAN HENRY is the Chief Meteorologist at FOX 4 in Dallas, Texas. A five-time Emmy award winner, Dan has covered the most notable weather events of the past several decades, from the East Coast Blizzard of 1996 to the deadly tornado outbreak in the DFW Metroplex on December 26, 2015. Dan has earned the prestigious Certified Broadcast Meteorologist designation from the American Meteorological Society. He regularly speaks to schools, businesses, churches, and civic organizations on severe weather preparedness. To connect, check out DanHenryWeather.com.