Doing the Math…

Morton EF2 Tornado and Satellite Vortex, Morton, Texas (2025)
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Like most decisions in life, choosing to chase tornadoes requires making a personal risk/reward calculation. The risks are real, but for me the potential reward was worth giving storm chasing one try. But a funny thing happened to my math on that first trip: the answer changed.

I think I’ve made it pretty clear in prior posts that the reward side of the storm chasing risk/reward equation far exceeded my (already quite high) expectations; what I haven’t fully expressed is how the risk factor decreased in my mind as well. Suddenly, I’ve become a storm chasing evangelist and have made storm chasing a featured part of my annual workshop portfolio.

My fascination with tornadoes dates back to the first time I saw the lurching vortex bearing down on the Gale homestead in “The Wizard of Oz.” That childhood fascination soon grew into a general passion to witness and understand Nature’s power in any form, and to boggle my mind pondering the incomprehensible vastness of our Universe.

Throughout my life I’ve pursued opportunities to observe (and photograph) examples of Nature’s power and majesty. I’ve chased brilliant comets, basked beneath the northern lights, gawked at a total solar eclipse, and stood awestruck on the rim of an erupting volcano. So it should be no surprise, after checking off all those other items on my must-see natural phenomenon list, that I set my sights on pursuing tornadoes and the storms that generate them. Since I’m no adrenaline junkie, when I dreamed about seeing a tornado, I never visualize one of those massive EF4 and EF5 monsters that ravage entire communities, it’s always been something like that ropey twister in “The Wizard of Oz.”

No responsible storm chaser draws pleasure from the suffering of others—fortunately, the vast majority of tornadoes strike wide-open spaces and do little to no damage. I can’t speak for all chasers, but the ones with whom I associate consciously avoid metropolitan areas, even when they offer the best chance of viewing success, because: 1) they’d only be in the way of people with much higher priorities; 2) no matter how great the photography, there’s no pleasure photographing the source of others’ suffering; and 3) it’s simply much harder to chase in a city.

Like most people, prior to the 2025 trip my closest approach to a tornado experience had come from the “Twister” movies. So after rewatching those movies to mentally prepare for that first storm chasing trip, my anxiety level started ratcheting up. And it sure didn’t help when people started looking at me like I was crazy for doing it. Had I miscalculated?

All of my tornado dreams and fears came into focus one afternoon in June 2025, when my chasing group saw six (I think—I actually lost track) tornadoes. That experience, along with several others we had on that 12-day adventure, revealed to me how naive I’d been about storm chasing risks, and most important, the (experience-based) caution taken by storm chasers to ensure the safety of all involved. (Spoiler alert: Storm chasing safety is not an accident.)

Obviously, no one can say there’s no risk to chasing extreme weather. But after doing it myself, I believe that most people don’t have an accurate perception of those risks. The big three are:

Lightning: Anytime you’re outside when lightning is about, there’s danger.
Hail: Large hail can damage buildings, vehicles, crops, and humans without discrimination.
Tornadoes: And of course a tornado devastates everything in its path.

But storm chasing isn’t “Twister”—I don’t know a single storm chaser who has had to duck a flying cow, or anchor themselves to a pipe with a leather belt to avoid being sucked heavenward. And unlike the way chasing is portrayed in the movies and reality TV, the last place most photographers (and certainly all the chasing photographers I associate with) want to be, is close to the storm they’re photographing. Too close not only puts us at greater risk, the closer we get, the worse the photography.

Like most anxiety-inducing experiences, the more I learned about storm chasing’s risks and the steps taken to minimize them, the safer I felt. I learned that mesocyclones, and the supercells they spawn, are extremely organized, with recognizable features like an anvil (the cap), inflow and outflow fed by updrafts and downdrafts, wall clouds, rotation, and even color-coded areas of hail. Returning to the risks I listed above, here’s the rest of the risk/safety story:

Lightning: Amazingly, an experienced storm chaser has a pretty good idea of where in a storm the lighting is likely to occur and avoids those areas—something I’ve witnessed first hand enough times to know it’s not a fluke. The safest place to be when lightning is about is inside a fully enclosed structure or vehicle. When a chasing group is outside photographing lightning, it’s always within a few feet of the van (or vans), so when the storm chaser in charge senses a risk, safety is just seconds away. And regardless of the lead chaser’s guidance, the proximity of the van always gives anyone in the group a safe place to retreat to whenever they feel unsafe. All this is probably why there have been no recorded storm chasing lightning deaths.
Hail: Hail forms in recognizable areas of a supercell, visible as a distinctly blue or green band or patch in the clouds. Additionally, (I learned firsthand that) approaching hail makes an audible roar that serves as a warning that it’s time to retreat to the shelter of the vans. Of course, while people can quickly retreat to their vehicles, the vehicles themselves aren’t quite so lucky—I’ve seen the dents to prove it—and the chasers are highly motivated to keep their vehicles intact and unscarred. One night last year, our storm chasing group was racing to outrun a storm that was about to move across our path. Even though it was completely dark, our chaser somehow knew where the hail would be and got our vans safely beneath a gas station canopy just in the nick of time. (Apparently that’s a thing in hail country, as we were soon joined at the station by a dozen or so other vehicles seeking shelter until the storm passed.)
Tornadoes: The atmospheric physics that form a tornado are readable to the people who chase storms for a living: the overall direction of the cell, the location in the cell where the tornado is likely to form, and more specifically, the dropping of the storm’s base, paired with its rotation, that signals a tornado is imminent.

Supercell and Lightning, Northeast Colorado

My first storm chasing lesson, learned on Day-1 of that first trip, is that the storm-chasing objective is to find a distant vantage point that provides: 1) safety; 2) the best chance to see any tornado that drops; and 3) a view of the entire supercell (FYI, one of the most jaw dropping sights on Earth).

All this is why responsible storm chasing photographers always partner with actual storm chasers. Not only do experienced chasers know how to use the technical atmospheric data, published daily by NOAA and the NWS, to determine where we should chase today, tomorrow, and the day after (West Texas? Oklahoma? Texas Panhandle?), they know how to read a supercell to identify its direction of motion, and the likely location of any tornado, hail, and lightning that might occur.

They also pay special attention to the roads that can get us in position, all possible escape routes, and whether the roads are paved or might just turn to tire-sucking mud in a downpour. (And just in case, we always back into every parking space, pointing our vans in the direction of escape.)

Supercell structure provides a (general) predictability of behavior that might explain why, with one notable exception, every storm chasing death has been traffic related. The exception? The 2 1/2-mile-wide El Reno tornado in 2013 that unexpectedly changed direction and accelerated, catching four experienced storm chasers off-guard.

But even that incident requires qualification. Three of those fatalities were experienced, respected meteorology scientists trying to navigate their vehicle close enough to the tornado to get their equipment inside the vortex (i.e., as close to it as possible). The fourth death in that storm was a solo local chaser who just got too close. Which of course is not to discount the risk of storm chasing. Rather, the El Reno tragedy is a cautionary tale that reminds all chasers since that Nature truly is in charge, and to never take a storm’s behavior for granted—an approach modeled for my groups multiple times when our leader Chris hustled us back into the vans when no danger was evident to my untrained eyes.

Morton EF2 Tornado and Satellite Vortex, Morton, Texas (2025)

Last year’s group received no better validation of our safety than we did on our tornado day. It started with the continuation of Chris’s savant-like foreknowledge that drove us two hours beneath blue skies, to get us set up at perfect place to view a burgeoning supercell that grew before our eyes. He then anticipated the when and where of the first tornado’s imminent formation, so we were all ready when it appeared. Finally, he knew when it was time to leave that supercell in favor of the one that eventually delivered the majority of that day’s twisters—including the EF2 Morton tornado in this image.

With one tornado already in our pockets, we turned onto a (usually) remote country road near Morton, Texas—and right into the most “Twister”-like scene of our trip: dozens of cars lining both sides of the road, many double-parked, their occupants sprinting this way and that to get in position for a supercell that was about to go off.

After somehow managing to find spots to stuff both of our vans among all the other haphazardly parked vehicles, we all grabbed our gear and raced to join the throngs at a fence across the road. Within minutes the first tornado formed, moving left to right across our view, maybe a half mile away. For more than an hour we photographed a series of mostly EF1 tornadoes dropping from the base of the wall cloud, spinning up a lot of dust from unplanted fields, each staying on the ground for several minutes before retreating to the sky.

By far the biggest tornado we saw was what is now known as the Morton Tornado, which eventually grew to more than a mile wide, traversed about ten miles across unpopulated farmland, with peak winds of 125 MPH. Looking at this image now, I realize this may have been the moment my math shifted. We were all so relaxed—brand new and experienced chasers alike—watching it. Not relaxed like we weren’t beside ourselves with excitement at the sight we were witnessing, but relaxed like there was absolutely nothing to fear.

Join me on a storm chasing trip