For the past ten years, I have chased tornadoes and their parent thunderstorms, the supercell, thousands of miles across the Great Plains.

As early as I can remember, my fascination turned into a lifelong pursuit to understand the storms after I read a book entitled “Tornadoes: Killer Storms” by George Laycock (out of print). It was less than 60 small pages of simple text and small illustrations, but the accounts of tornado damage, awe-struck survivors, and the scientists who dedicate their lives to the research & understanding of this mysterious & complex phenomenon completely engrossed me.

    Living in Los Angeles at the time, I didn’t have much to feed my insatiable curiosity with, other than the occasional winter time thunderstorms with lightning striking the nearby hills. Traveling to Tornado Alley seemed like a pipe dream until after January 1994, when the catastrophic Northridge Earthquake forced our family to consider the move. By itself, that temblor (and thousand or so aftershocks) wasn’t the only factor, but that’s a different story.

    As a child I loved reading all the severe weather literature I could get my hands on. Other sciences interested me as well-- astronomy, seismology, human anatomy-- even advanced aircraft design & performance... they were all fascinating subjects that kept me busy for hours on end. However, I quickly realized the biggest problems with those subjects was the timeframes they occurred on and accessibility to real wold, hands-on and, most importantly, experiential resources I could learn from.

    After moving to the beautiful city of Denver, Colorado in late ’94, suddenly the Great Plains of the Midwest was at our doorstep! While I continued my self-education, it wasn’t until a bit later (around the Fall of ’98), that I saw my first tornado. It was a fairly weak cone tornado that touched down just 45 minutes east of Denver (a few miles northeast of Byers, CO). Unfortunately, my recording equipment at the time was fairly low-tech and any footage I had of the tornado all but disappeared. It was spawned from a gorgeous LP (low-precipitation) huge bell-shaped mesocyclone that formed on the west end of a line of severe storms moving southeast across northeast Colorado. It happened on a classic high-plains severe weather day, known as the Denver Cyclone, when the surface winds just east of or over Denver start spinning counter-clockwise, creating the low-level shear storms need to quickly develop huge explosive rotating updrafts & become severe. For more information, check out this brief summary.

    Since that day, I have chased & documented many severe storms and tornadoes, had my footage aired on both local & national news, taken incredible photographs & videos of thunderstorms, tornadoes, & lightning from up-close, and had the opportunity to chase with many other committed and passionate storm chasers over the years! The world of storm chasing has changed in many ways since my inception in the early ‘90s, with more people, TV shows, & headlines than I ever imagined.