With climate change causing more tornadoes and more intense storms that can do as much or more damage than a twister itself, storm chasing is turning into big business -- and a big tourism draw for extreme outdoors thrillseekers. Writer Linda Logan travels to the tornado hunter capital of the US, Tulsa, Oklahoma, for this week's Sunday Long Read.
I've been hooked on tornadoes since I was a kid. I used to dream I was lying in my backyard as a black funnel cloud passed silently—and safely—over me. A shrink later told me the dream represented “safe danger,” but I never understood half of what he said, including that. As I grew older, I became a climate dilettante. I read about global warming and the coming ice age, wondered why barometric pressure affected dogs, and drew cloud charts in my daily planner. I saw Twister, of course. And I kept having that dream.
I wanted to see a real storm for myself, but there was the business of finishing grad school and raising kids. So I back-burnered tornadoes for decades and nearly forgot about them. Then, last winter, I saw a blurb in a travel magazine about stormchasing tours. I thought only Hollywood actors or meteorology nerds were allowed to chase tornadoes. But for $2,300 a week, I could, too. I justified it to my now adult children, saying that if I died, at least it would be while doing something incredibly cool.
And I did. Not die—do something cool.
I decided to book the Mayhem 1 tour with Extreme Chase Tours, one of some 20 stormchasing outfits in the country, which promises a 90 percent chance of seeing a tornado over the course of six days. Not only was the company vetted by the review site StormChasingUSA, it had fewer people per van and was relatively affordable compared with others (many run $2,500 and up). All trips are based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the epicenter of Tornado Alley, a swath of land that runs from central Texas to South Dakota and spawns many of the approximately 1,200 events each year.
While I knew Oklahoma and the southern plains were likely to produce tornadoes in May and early June, a period when cold fronts from the Arctic that haven’t been weakened on their way south meet the warm air from the Gulf of Mexico, I still had to manage my expectations—there are never guarantees when it comes to weather. But after arriving at my motel in Tulsa last summer and turning on the Weather Channel, it reported a tornado near the town of Buffalo, a little over three hours west, around 6:30 P.M. I was optimistic.
The next morning, I met owner and operator Lanny Dean: think Michael Moore with the baseball cap turned backwards. A tuft of hair sprouted through what my daughters call the “ponytail hole.” He’s a big, affable man in his mid-forties and was wearing a T-shirt with “Outlaw Chasers” printed on the front. (The back read “Show Me or Blow Me.”) With him was a guy named Mike, a forty-something out of San Antonio and my fellow chaser. Mike had already been on ten chasing tours, many of them with Dean. There was supposed to be another couple with us, but they bailed at the last minute.
Dean was seven years old and sitting in the back seat of the family car when he first saw a twisting, funnel-shaped black cloud skitter across the Texas landscape, plucking boards off the side of a barn. “Shit, yes, it terrified me,” he said. “It was the most scary, awe-inspiring thing I’ve ever seen. It’s what hooked me.”
The fear turned into fascination. At Missouri State, he did some undergraduate work in atmospheric science (“a kick-ass field,” he said) and ended up with a Bachelor of Science in electronic engineering telecommunication. He later became a severe-weather reporter and photographer and starred in TruTV’s Tornado Hunters. Since launching his guiding company in 1999, he’s seen 581 tornadoes and 13 major hurricanes up close and has held hail the size of a softball in his hand. He’s a frequent video contributor to Good Morning America. His 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan has some 300,000 miles on it. The van’s been battered and busted, it’s sloshed through the kind of deep mud puddles you only see in car commercials, and has a shattered side mirror. But it’s clean, well-maintained, and Dean only smokes at gas stops. Between this van and his previous chase vehicle, he figures he’s driven 700,000 miles since he started as a guide. He’d been thinking of springing for a new rig.
Mike rode shotgun. A Lenovo computer was mounted to the passenger-side dashboard and a monitor to the back of its seat, so I could see what they were looking at. After Mike pulled up RadarScope, a weather app used by everyone from meteorologists to emergency responders, he and Dean started chatting about base reflectivity, super-res velocity, something called CAPE, and rear-flank downdraft. Dean eyed me in the rearview mirror, saying, “You’re gonna hear a lot of verbiage. You’re not gonna understand it, but I’ll keep yakking until you do.”
“It’s a good chase day,” he told us. “There’s a mess of convection near Gotebo, so we’re busting south.” We hauled out of Tulsa and soon passed Oklahoma City. “We’re going to play the dry line”—a separation between the warm, humid air from the Gulf and the hot, dry air from the desert Southwest—“and go for broke.” In other words, a flurry of movement driven by a rising air mass was a promising enough indicator for a superstorm that Dean felt the three-hour drive to Gotebo was worth it.
A few hours later, a mass of red dots appeared on the monitor. “Those are other chasers,” Mike explained.
“And those are just the guys with their beacons on,” Dean added. “For every dot you see, there are probably five to ten other guys like me who’ve turned their icons off.” If you click on a dot, the chaser’s name and phone number pops up. Since Dean’s a professional stormchaser, if his icon is on, chasers will start chasing him, like bikers drafting off the lead cyclist during the Tour de France.
Anyone can call themselves a chaser. There’s no licensing or certification required, just enough gall to get close to a storm and enough brains to know when to retreat. Equipment helps, but having a cell phone with a couple of apps like Dark Sky and RadarScope and tuning into the NOAA Weather Radio station will do. Stormchasing started catching on after the movie Twister came out in 1996. (Dean hated it. “Nobody—nobody—drives through a cornfield,” he said. “They just don’t.”) Spurred by its success, a handful of stormchaser shows further helped capture people’s imaginations, while the development of new technology, such as GPS units made for civilian use, made it possible for others to do it themselves. Since then it’s not only become a popular pastime among meteorologists, researchers, and photographers but adrenaline junkies who treat it as an obsessive quest, on a par with eclipse chasers and high pointers. According to Dean, the addiction is very real—77 percent of his guests are repeat customers.
Dean’s safety and expertise are among the reasons many chasers return to chase with him rather than attempt to head out on their own. And those are good reasons when it comes to this activity—according to the Congressional Research Service, tornadoes are one of the main causes of property destruction in the U.S., second only to hurricanes, which also wreak significant havoc, as we recently witnessed when Hurricane Laura made landfall. Despite this, records of stormchasing incidents show that weather-related fatalities are low compared to the risk posed by other chasers. In 2019, the community website Stormtrack reported that 12 of the 15 known stormchasing-related deaths were the result of car collisions.
I remember watching Storm Chasers on Discovery Channel some 10 years ago, and that's as close as I ever want to get to an actual tornado. Besides, I've been through a couple of hurricanes and a blizzard or two, and frankly it's not as fun as you might think.
Sadly, we're going to see a lot more tornadoes to chase in the future thanks to climate change. Disaster tourism shouldn't be a growth industry, but here we are.
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