(Photo Courtesy of Iowa State University)
(Ames) Always make sure you have an escape route. Stay on paved roads when you can. Don’t get too close.
Iowa State University students and instructors chasing storms this spring knew those rules well, remembering their own experiences and having lessons on storm chasing drilled in over the past eight weeks. Looking back at their observation of the EF-3 tornado that tore through Carbon, Iowa, on May 21, some acknowledged that they got too close.
Debris was falling around the three-car caravan from about one mile away from the tornado, recent ISU graduate and storm chaser Hunter Fowkes said, twigs and tree limbs drifting around in a “surreal” scene as the students realized they were in its path. When Fowkes gave the signal to go, ISU “Field Observations of Thunderstorms” co-instructor Bill Gallus said he didn’t really want to leave, it was so mesmerizing.
“I don’t think you’ll realize the power of the systems and of the tornadoes until you’re in that situation and witnessing it,” said co-instructor Dave Flory. “We were too close to the Carbon tornado, and it was incredible.”
A team of three Iowa State University instructors and 13 students traversed the Midwest for eight days in late May, chasing storms and visiting weather centers and landmarks as part of a course on storm observation.
Gallus and Flory had spoken about teaching a class with a storm chasing component for a long time, Flory said, but figuring out logistics, matching schedules and finding a time to take a class storm chasing trip when it wouldn’t interfere with the semester was a difficult task.
However, Gallus said students have been asking about a storm chasing course almost every year of his 29-year career at ISU. The pair knew that many of the students in Fowkes’ class had chased storms before, so they “bit the bullet” and planned the course with co-instructor Lindsay Maudlin.
Fowkes has been chasing storms since he was 12 years old and has been fascinated by severe weather most of his life. He grew up in Arizona, seeing dust devils and desert thunderstorms, then moved to Colorado, where he got to see all four seasons.
He saw his first tornado after his family moved to Cedar Falls. They heard on the news about nearby tornado warnings and his father suggested the family go check it out.
“We all piled in the van, drove out, sat for 45 minutes and got lucky,” Fowkes said. “A storm produced a tornado right in front of us, and from that point, I’ve been hooked.”
While any student could enroll in the class, the instructors had all seniors signed up when the course began in early March. During the semester, students were taught about storm formation, storm safety, instrumentation and more, and heard from a National Weather Service guest lecturer. They also participated in a simulated storm chase, where students would use information given every hour to determine where they should go to observe storms.
Most, if not all, of the students had chasing experience before signing up for the class, Maudlin said, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t see anything new on the trip. The group took three cars filled with supplies and equipment for launching weather balloons and set out, not knowing exactly where storm activity would take them.
There’s a saying in the meteorology field, Gallus said, that when you’re planning a field study to observe a certain kind of weather, Mother Nature laughs and decides to do the opposite.
“I think Mother Nature was rolling as we went through the prep stuff and talking about safety, because we had such an insanely active eight-day period that there were some learning experiences thrown at us that I don’t think we would have ever imagined what would actually happen,” Gallus said.
