We join a team of storm chasers on a unique tour of the USA’s Great Plains to learn how an obsession became an invaluable service in a country hit by 1,200 tornadoes every year

Words & visuals Emma Thomson

Rain and hail ricocheted off the car like sniper fire. Our phones blared siren-like, their screens hijacked by an emergency alert. It was then that the music on the radio was severed by long, shrill beeps. A tense automated voice came over the airwaves: “The National Weather Service has issued a severe storm warning – it’s capable of producing a tornado. Hazards include flying debris, baseball-size hail, damage to windows, roofs and vehicles. Take shelter now...”

It felt like a movie, except there was no possibility of hitting pause – we were in it. It was mid-May and I was in Oklahoma storm-chasing with Weather Holidays as part of a convoy of three 4WD vehicles led by veteran UK-born chaser Paul Botten.

His voice crackled over the radio: “We’re going to have a tornado come across our front any minute. It’s two miles (3.2km) to our south-east. We’re ultra-close.”

The rain pulled back and I lowered my window to look ahead. Bruised clouds swirled above us, birds had stopped singing and the wind rushed at our backs, seemingly trying to push our cars into the cauldron. Tendrils of dirt lifted up from the ground and joined with the vortex reaching down from the sky like a crooked finger. And then, suddenly, a tornado touched down and swept across the road ahead of us.

The world went mute. I watched the twister twirl across the fields and waited for a jolt of fear to course through me. It never came.

Chasers call tornadoes the ‘Finger of God’. They have been recorded on every continent except Antarctica and can pluck windmills from the ground like daisies, raze towns to rubble and even make pigs fly. Throughout history their ability to unleash chaos has evoked equal parts fascination and fear. In Eastern Europe, they were said to be the work of Baba Yaga, a flying witch that destroys forests; for the Kiowa of America’s Great Plains, they were instances of Mánkayía, the great medicine horse with a serpent’s tail, rearing up into the sky.

Even in popular culture today, twisters still hold a sense of wonder. It was a tornado that whisked Dorothy and her terrier, Toto, away to a magical Technicolor realm in the 1939 film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, and this summer gone, popcorn-thriller Twisters, a sequel to the 1996 hit Twister, made more than US$330 million at the box office. But where I was headed in the US, tornadoes are neither myth nor fiction; they are very real indeed.

The US National Weather Service reports that, on average, tornadoes are responsible for the deaths of 80 Americans every year, injuring 1,500 more. This was why I had joined Weather Holiday’s team of storm chasers, whose tours are not just about a unique experience; they provide valuable data to those trying to reduce the risk for everyone.

Movie monster

They were right to set the Twister movies in America. Of all the tornadoes recorded in the world annually, 75% touch down in the US, with some 1,200 dropping each year. These mostly occur across three main strips: Dixie Alley, Tornado Alley and High Plains Alley. When the season reaches its peak between May and June, around a quarter tear through Tornado Alley alone, a north-to-south corridor loosely defined as parts of South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas and eastern Colorado. It’s also where I was headed.

These are the Great Plains of the Midwest, America’s largely flat ‘Heartland’, characterised by vast cow farms, houses with porch swings, ‘Honk ‘n’ Holler’ Sinclair gas stations, two-street towns straight out of a western film set and roads so straight and long that you’d half expect to hear ‘meep meep’ as Roadrunner speeds by.

My journey began in Denver, Colorado, where I met up with the storm-chaser crew led by Essex-born tour leader Paul Botten, who remembers the name, date and EF rating (intensity based on devastation caused) of each of the 291 tornadoes he’s seen. He was joined by our indefatigable drivers, Graham Moore, Tom Lynch and Jeff Prescott, all of whom have been chasing for over a decade, and some for much longer.

“It’s not like Twister,” joked Mancunian Graham as we refuelled at a petrol station. “There’s lots of fretting, forecasting and sleeping in random places. They don’t show the six hours of driving required to get to a location on the big screen,” he grinned.

The first few days were marred by blue skies, so we stopped in Wakita, Oklahoma, a one-road-in, one-road-out town of less than 400. For five months, during the summer of 1995, Hollywood came to visit, and it was here that several scenes from the movie Twister were shot. When the film crew arrived, Wakita hadn’t seen a tornado since 1973, but this isolated town – already in need of having several buildings demolished – made the perfect set.

“There were more of [the crew] than there were of us,” laughed Linda Wade, a local resident who served briefly as an extra. “They had to get used to us, ’cause we were always askin’: how ya doin’? What ya doin’?” she laughed.

Ever since then, Linda has run the small Twister The Movie Museum (open April–August), filled with photos and memorabilia, including one of the film’s four famous ‘Dorothys’, metal canisters containing sensors to measure funnel structure.These formed a key part of the plot, as the characters hoped the data gathered would increase the tornado warning system from three to 15 minutes.

“Nearly 30 years later, the National Weather Service have only extended siren warnings to 16 minutes,” said Paul soberly. “We’re hoping to push it to 30 minutes…” he added, trailing off. Soon after, I found out why.

Why do it?

Sometimes things go wrong. When I asked Paul and the drivers what was the scariest experience they’d had, they all quietly mumbled, “El Reno”. To learn more, they drove me two hours south of Wakita and turned onto a gravel road backed by a field of wheat. Erected against the wire fence was a large granite headstone. Driver Tom removed his baseball cap, scratched his forehead and began to narrate his worst ever 24 hours.

“The atmosphere that day was like touching a battery to your tongue – it was so charged,” he told me. At 6.05pm on 31 May 2013, the widest tornado ever recorded touched down 13km south-west of El Reno, on the western outskirts of Oklahoma City. It spanned 2.4km wide, but within 48 seconds it had crossed Highway 83 and grown to 4.5km in width, before making a highly erratic 135-degree turn to the north.

Sadly, the sudden change of direction caught experienced storm chasers Tim Samaras, his son Paul and friend Carl Young off guard. Their Chevrolet truck was sucked up and rotated around the vortex twice before hitting the ground at more than 320kph. A memorial stands where the car landed. Wind speeds had reached around 480kph – some of the strongest ever recorded. The tornado claimed nine lives that day.

“We knew [of their deaths] before it broke on the news,” said Paul. “It was absolutely an EF5,” he added as we surveyed the mementoes left by chasers paying their respects. “But they downgraded it to an EF3 based on structural damage. That’s the thing: a tornado’s rating isn’t based on size or wind speed; it’s based on what it destroys.”

Despite the huge numbers of tornadoes that strike this part of America, they are still statistically unlikely. Between 5% and 10% of supercell thunderstorms produce a tornado.

“So much has to happen for it to form that structure,” Paul told me.
In the UK, the average storm lasts 40 minutes. Out here, they can last up to ten hours and carry the same power as an atomic bomb, but it takes just the right conditions.

“You need ‘SLIM’: sheer, lift, instability and moisture,” explained Paul. “And they occur on the Great Plains because cold, dry air from Canada caps warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, creating instability. The cooler air begins to sink, sending the warmer air spinning upward; as it continues to suck in warm air, a ‘hook’ forms and tornadic rotation may start.” He cited a long litany of ideal dewpoints and temperatures, then looked at me closely to see if I was following along. “Failing that,” he reassured me, “sticky palms are a good sign something is brewin’.”

Chasing has changed a lot over the last decade. Back when Paul started, he’d go into the local library, print off a map, watch the weather reports on TV and try to tally the alerts against the information he had.

“We really learned how to watch the skies in those days,” he told me.
Now, thanks to cellular data, everyone has on-the-go access to the Doppler radar weather surveillance system and the number of chasers has ballooned. Many chaser vehicles carry a GPS tracker that flags as a red dot on the radar; on some chase days, the map can look like a swarm of angry bees. Things can get chaotic, and some people question the ethics of chasing when the storms cause such devastation and, sometimes, loss of life.

“We have more equipment and radars than local officials,” explained Canadian driver Jeff. “Most places only have remote monitoring offices, so it’s people calling in from out on the ground that offer the most accurate information. Plus, when locals see 4WDs or vans in a line, they know bad weather is coming, so they’ll turn on their radios to check.”

Australian chaser Thomas Hinterdorfer added: “Everyone wants a funnel to hit a field. No one wants towns hit, but unfortunately those hits happen whether we’re present or not.” Yet, when tornadoes do begin to stray close to a town, chasers are frequently among the first responders, he told me. “We often get there before the emergency services and will immediately drop chasing to help.”

But there is perhaps another question that should be asked: why join them? The reality is that the tours have provided a financial basis for this team to continue their valuable work; they wouldn’t be able to return season after season without this support. And as we drove on, I was starting to
understand what drew them to this life.

Thunderstruck

Day six dawned quietly, so we detoured for lunch at Meers, a saloon-style restaurant serving 17oz burgers and homemade cherry cobbler since 1901.

“What y’all here for?” asked our waitress.

“Spinning water vapour,” teased Paul.

By 4pm we were sat beside an abandoned barn near Mangum, Oklahoma, watching the clouds starting to organise.

“Is that something?” I asked Paul.

“Yeah, it’s an SLC – a scary looking cloud,” he said.

A while later, sonic booms reverberated in the distance and we scattered back into the cars. Two supercells had developed. A weather commentator came on the radio: “They’re going to get together, shake hands and then crank up – it’s gonna be a huge storm.” Not long after, the brooding clouds crashed together.

“It’ll reorganise now,” said Paul. “There’s nothing to stop it munching all the warm air.” And sure enough, a slow-moving wedge tornado dropped shortly after. We got out to watch from a safe distance.

“Listen,” said driver Tom, pointing to the sky. A deep rumble, like one of the 130-carriage freight trains we’d seen rolling along the horizon, echoed above us. “That’s hail roar – the ice balls rub against each other in the sky.”

The in-rush of warm air dissipated, so we returned to our 4WD thinking it was over. We’d only driven a few kilometres when I turned to look over my left-hand shoulder. Something akin to a ghostly leg was striding across the fields.

“Thick stovepipe tornado on the ground,” I spluttered. We screeched the cars to a halt and tumbled out. Paul looked over at me, a wry smile on his face: “You’re thunderstruck.” I could suddenly understand why he’d done this for 21 years.

“[Chasing] shows you your threshold,” he said. “Some gawp, some turn white as ghosts, some want to get even closer. You can tell someone what it’s like, but they won’t really know until they experience it.

Goodbye Kansas

For me, it all started on 10 April 1979, when an EF4 tornado hit Wichita Falls. It was on the front page of all the newspapers and I was riveted,” said David Ewoldt, who greeted us outside his house in Okarche, Oklahoma, sporting a grey goatee and a weathered baseball cap. David chased his first storm aged 14 and had served as a mentor to Paul. On his forearm was a tattoo of lightning crackling above one of those iconic Midwest metal watermills. “It’s from one of my own photos,” he said, having noticed me staring at it.

He led us out of the blistering sun and into the cool darkness of his home office. A worn leather chair sat in front of a barrage of screens filled with metrics. Lying in front of them was his ginger cat, Sarge.

“If thunder booms, he won’t even flinch,” he added, proudly stroking the cat’s head. On the wall hung a 1957 weather station map equipped with a ruler to hand-plot storms.

“You know, David often predicts storms before any models do,” said Paul. “He’s an absolute magician.”

"Look, I started chasing because I wanted to be able to verify a forecast,” said David. “Then something else took over. It’s not about the scary rush; it’s just amazing what can be painted in the sky simply by air.”

It was in Kansas, days later, when I truly grasped what David had meant. A long “Ooooh” had just escaped Paul’s lips when I turned to look at him quizzically. The Storm Prediction Center had just issued a PDS severe thunderstorm warning.

“A Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS),” Paul explained. “They’re ultra-rare. I’ve only received four in 20 years.” Within the hour, a growing anvil of cloud had blotted out the sun. We drove through rolling grasslands of wildflowers and I noticed cows huddling in the corner of a field. They knew something was coming.

A bolt of smooth-channel lightning crackled to the earth. “There’s your first clue,” said Paul. “Look at the flag,” he gestured, pointing to a star-spangled banner posted outside a house. It was completely horizontal. “It shows moisture is ripping in from the south-east.”

In Kiowa, the sky turned leaden. “Fast mover on our left; we’ve gotta watch out for that or it’s gonna crash into us,” shouted Paul above the warnings blaring through the radio. “Emma, keep an eye on it – it’s trying to organise.”

I searched the sky looking for rotations and tendrils descending from the low, glowering clouds, now backlit with the green glow of hail. “Next right,” shouted Paul, and Graham swerved us onto a red-mud road. And there she was: a thick, rain-wrapped tornado grabbing at a field of golden wheat. We chased her back over the border, into Oklahoma, and I couldn’t resist pointing out: “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”