You’ve been waiting months for your vacation, and now that it’s finally here you couldn’t be more excited. When you turn on The Weather Channel, you’re doubly pleased to see that the forecast is perfect: severe thunderstorms, high winds, and a good chance of hail. Better yet, a tornado warning has just been issued for the area. Obviously, this is not your typical vacation—you’re traveling across the Great Plains in search of twisters. To those who were born without a risk-taking gene, tornado chasing must seem downright crazy. After all, most people run away from tornadoes, not toward them.
 
On May 3, 1999, a total of 76 twisters ripped through Oklahoma and Kansas; 48 people died in what turned out to be one of the worst tornado outbreaks in American history. From May 4 to May 10, 2003, 393 twisters tore through several states, including some of the same Oklahoma City communities damaged in 1999, killing 44 people.

But since the 1996 release of the movie Twister, public interest in the phenomenon has soared and the tornado-chasing tour business has boomed. Martin Lisius is one entrepreneur who saw the trend developing and jumped in with both feet. A longtime tornado chaser and weather buff, Lisius established Tempest Tours Storm Chasing Expeditions, and now he and his staff spend their springs introducing their guests to Tornado Alley and some of the most spectacular weather on Earth. I contacted Martin while doing research for a weather book, and he invited me to join a storm chase. It turned out to be the experience of a lifetime.

Hitting the road

It’s a beautiful morning as I follow the Tempest Tours van out of Oklahoma City, three years to the day after the 1999 outbreak. To save a little money I’ve decided to cover the chase in a rental car instead of riding in the massive Ford E-350 chase van, a decision that will turn out to be a big mistake. Driving the van is Dean Cosgrove, a longtime chaser who moved to Nebraska just to be closer to prime chasing territory. Beside him is tour director Bill Reid, a California-based climatologist with a degree in geography. It’s clear the two love this job, and as the 10-day tour progresses, it becomes obvious they’re also good at it.

The van seats six passengers, and on this tour it carries an eclectic mix. There’s Tommy, just out of college and concluding a cross-country trek that took him from Ohio to Big Sur. Lisa is a veteran tornado tourist who spent time in Antarctica at the McMurdo Sound Research Station. Luca and Alexandra are Italians who live in Luxembourg and came to the United States to chase tornadoes after seeing Twister. Andy and Brian are medical colleagues from New Mexico who often take unusual vacations. Everyone but Lisa is on his or her first tornado tour.

Storm chasing primarily involves travel—usually hundreds of miles a day. Atmospheric hot spots can shift dramatically during a tour, and the end of a long day of chasing often means another lengthy trip to get into position for the next day’s chase. Like war, tornado chasing has been described as hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror. Tornado-chasing veteran Lisa assures me it’s all worth it when you see your first twister.

But even without twisters, spring weather on the Great Plains still can hold your attention. Thirty-mile-wide “supercells” rising thousands of feet into the sky can produce giant hailstones and explosive lightning displays, and collapsing thunderstorms can create gust fronts and mini-vortexes called “gustnadoes,” which actually are tiny twisters. Sudden, torrential downpours can quickly flood low-lying areas, cutting off chasers’ escape routes.

Gorgeous days like this are a bane to chasers. Unlike a trip to Disney World, which assures you at least a glimpse or two of Mickey, there is no guarantee you’ll see a twister on a tornado tour. Bill estimates about half Tempest’s tours result in a tornado sighting, although it may be from quite a distance. Experience, persistence, and plain luck play major roles, but if Mother Nature decides not to cooperate, there’s no way to artificially manufacture a tornado.

We stop in Abilene, Texas, for the night, as strong storms are forecast for the following afternoon. At dinner, Bill tells me people are starting to recognize the van because of the forest of antennae on its roof, and its mere presence can cause a flurry of concern. “Waitresses always ask, ‘There isn’t going to be a tornado here, is there?’ ” says Bill. “I always tell them, ‘I hope so.’ ”

Chasing storms

If you like to sleep in during vacation, you’ll love tornado chasing. To really get going, the supercells that spawn twisters need plenty of solar energy, and that takes time to build. Most chases don’t begin until midday, when the sun has heated the ground enough to send cumulonimbus clouds soaring into the sky. By that time, veteran chasers already are in position and ready to pick the most promising storm.

Each chase day begins with Bill and Dean on the Internet assessing the day’s chances for severe weather. The two visit Web sites such as the National Severe Storms Laboratory for the latest forecasts. You wouldn’t know it from the movie Twister, but tornadoes are a fairly uncommon phenomenon, and finding them requires great skill and dedication.

Unlike hurricanes, which can last for a week or more, most tornadoes last only a few minutes, with an average ground track of just four miles or so. They’re a lot smaller than hurricanes, too—usually just 400 or 500 feet wide—although some monster funnels have grown to more than a mile in diameter. Hurricanes generally mosey along at 10 to 15 mph, but tornadoes usually zip along at an average speed of 20 to 50 mph, and some have been clocked doing more than 70 mph.

That’s why having a good road network when chasing is essential—and the one around Abilene is less than great. We head toward San Angelo, where we’re joined by Martin. Around 7 p.m., after much repositioning, a severe thunderstorm warning is broadcast on the radio. As we approach a particularly nasty supercell, the sky turns an impressive blue-black, punctuated by jagged lightning. As we skirt the core, we’re pelted with jawbreaker-size hail, but we make it through and park facing a plowed field.

The setting sun illuminates the background rain shield with a dirty orange glow, and to our right the sky still is black. As we watch, low shards of cloud called scud begin a “demon dance,” flitting up and down as they ride on invisible air currents under the storm. Some begin to rotate, and suddenly one small vortex after another appears on the far side of the field, like spinning puffs of black smoke. As the procession passes, we give chase on a parallel road.

As night falls, the storm dissipates, so we head back to the motel in Abilene. On the way there, a tornado warning is issued for the town, and Bill checks the radar picture via his laptop computer. Churning their way up I-20 are three massive supercells; on radar they resemble giant red and orange amoebas. We quickly head off in pursuit.

Chasing these massive thunderstorms in the daytime is exciting enough, but at night they’re truly awesome, ejecting vast spiderwebs of lightning that crackle over our heads like celestial neural networks. At 11 p.m. we break for dinner at an interstate truck stop, and one of the storms we’d been chasing turns the tables as it pins us there for an hour, rocking the prefabricated steel building with large hail and lightning.

By 1:30 a.m. we make it back to the motel, but the lingering adrenaline rush makes it hard to sleep.

Tornado sighting

The next day, we head for the Texas panhandle. The forecast there is looking particularly promising, with a west-southwest jet stream flow around 30,000 feet and southeast surface winds. Tornadoes need wind shear to develop, and with upper and lower winds going in nearly opposite directions, conditions seem ripe for the development of twisters. There’s also a high dew point—warm air saturated with moisture—and a “dryline” approaching from the west. A dryline marks the place where dry air converges with moist air, and often becomes a flashpoint for supercells and tornadoes on days like this.

Around 6:30 p.m. we’re nearing the town of Happy, Texas, and the sky is beginning to brew. There’s a lowering cloud on the far side of town, and we pull off the interstate to inspect it. We pass a church where services are in progress and make our way to a cemetery on the edge of town, just in time to see that a wall cloud has formed under the supercell we saw from the interstate. Wall clouds are evidence of circulation inside a thunderstorm—called a mesocyclone—and often precede a tornado.

There’s a ragged wedge descending from the wall cloud, and as it rotates above, black dirt flies up from the ground underneath and begins to revolve, as if a herd of wild horses were stampeding in a circle. As the black wedge descends, the rotating earth below it spins higher until the two masses meet and form a thick funnel with dark tendrils snaking in and out of the rotation like tentacles. The wind rushing past us on its way into the monster’s maw makes a low rumble, but the twister is silent. Bill later tells me that you have to be about a quarter of a mile away to hear a tornado’s characteristic freight-train roar. We’re about a mile from this one, and I’m beginning to feel that’s still too close.

Suddenly emergency sirens go off in the town of Happy, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. Until now I’ve had a sense of detachment, as if I were watching a movie, but the sirens snap me back to reality. People could die here. We could die. “It is magnificent!” I hear Luca shout above the rushing wind. Ominously, the twister seems to be getting bigger.

“I think we need to get out of here!” yells Dean.

“Everybody back in the van!” Bill bellows, and there’s a flurry of knees and elbows as we beat a hasty retreat to our vehicles. Speeding back toward town, we can see the tornado heading in the same direction, now chasing us toward Happy. We’re going to beat it there, but just barely. As we make the turn toward the

interstate, we pass tumbleweeds rolling madly toward the funnel. One crashes into my car, making a substantial impact—they’re not as light as they look. I glance over my left shoulder and all I can see are pieces of trees and buildings swirling through the air.

On the interstate, we park under an overpass to get out of the rain and watch the funnel slowly cross the highway. Instead of the angry black wedge that chased us out of town, the tornado has become a tall and willowy gray-green ghost, and as it drifts over the road it begins to pull a shawl of rain around itself. Soon it disappears completely, and the tourists celebrate their first tornado sighting with handshakes and high fives all around.

“It’s amazing that nature could produce something that monstrous,” marvels Tommy. “The raw power of it was just awe inspiring, especially to know that it’s something that cannot be controlled. Absolutely incredible.”

At a nearby rest stop we learn two people died in the storm, and things get much quieter. “That really takes the bloom off the rose, doesn’t it?” I hear Lisa murmur. The ironically named Happy tornado destroyed half the town, including the church we passed, and changed the lives of hundreds of its residents forever. In Dean’s 25 years of chasing, this is his first fatal storm. And it’s only day three.

Hail storms

Although tornado chasing might seem like a macabre pursuit to some, chasers actually help law enforcement and meteorological agencies by reporting severe weather to authorities, providing early warning of developing storms and deadly tornadoes. They’re the eyes and ears of the National Weather Service, providing real-time feedback and ground-based confirmation of radar-indicated twisters. And they help educate the public about the dangers of severe weather and how to protect themselves.

It turned out that our tour had peaked early: The next week was relatively uneventful, save for a couple of highlights. On Saturday, for example, a hailstorm took us by surprise. We had stopped to watch a beautiful sunset after a long chase day when I turned to see a giant hail core heading our way. I jumped in the car and yelled to the group, but before we could make it back to the paved highway the storm hit. For 10 minutes the car rocked while golf-ball-sized and larger hail continuously hammered it. The storm did $7,000 in damage to my rental car, but for once I had listened to my wife’s advice and bought the damage waiver. The van escaped with barely a dent.

So next year, if you can’t decide between the mountains or the beach, consider something a little more unusual and try a tornado-chasing vacation. If you’re lucky enough to see a tornado up close and personal, it’s a sight you’ll never forget. But do yourself a favor: Ride in the van.