Newspaper looking for storm chasers

[UKjournalist]

Hi everyone, I'm a journalist and I'm writing about storm chasing in the UK. I'm hoping to speak to a few storm chasers (if that's the right term) about why you do it, how you do it, and some of the storms you've seen in the UK.

 

If anyone is interested in talking to me, please email me at emine.saner[at]guardian.co.uk and I'll be happy to give you more details. Sorry for the short notice, but I would need to speak to you either this evening (Wednesday) or at some point tomorrow. Thanks!

[paul m]

It's a good job you said the guardian. If you had said the Express this topic would have gone into meltdown.

[UKjournalist]

Yes, I can honestly say I've never been responsible for any "snowmageddon" headlines! But we are interested in storm chasing, and it would be great to speak to people who do it. 

[Amanzi]

Hi everyone, I'm a journalist and I'm writing about storm chasing in the UK. I'm hoping to speak to a few storm chasers (if that's the right term) about why you do it, how you do it, and some of the storms you've seen in the UK.

 

If anyone is interested in talking to me, please email me at emine.saner[at]guardian.co.uk and I'll be happy to give you more details. Sorry for the short notice, but I would need to speak to you either this evening (Wednesday) or at some point tomorrow. Thanks!

Hi, Send a message to Paul Sherman. He arranges the storm chasing groups here. I think there is a member search feature

[Rustynailer]

I do a bit of chasing on the Isle of Wight, but that is as far as I get. It is great fun I started doing it in 2005,  I joined this forum and found out how to chase properly.

The Netweather chasers took the very famous Michael Fish with them to the USA chasing a few years back, oh yes and they all go to a Steakhouse called the big Texan and try and eat steaks the size of the dining table LOL

It is great reading about their chasing and eating

•  

Edited January 8, 2014 by Rustynailer

[The PIT]

Yes, I can honestly say I've never been responsible for any "snowmageddon" headlines! But we are interested in storm chasing, and it would be great to speak to people who do it. 

Why not book a place on the tour and have first hand experience.

[Supacell]

I do a lot of storm chasing in the UK. I shall send a pm tomorrow if I get the time with work commitments etc.

[IanM]

Emine is looking for UK chasing experiences, not the USA chases, this is a good chance for you to tell your story in a national newspaper :-)

[Coast]

Storm chasing in the UK: Britain's wild weather enthusiasts

Emine Saner - The Guardian, Friday 10 January 2014 18.45 GMT

 

As fierce weather batters the UK, a growing number of storm hunters are taking to their cars to chase the wildest conditions. Why? To pit their wits against mother nature

 

As soon as he was old enough to ride a bike and get it up a hill, David Vicary began watching the weather, waiting for dramatic thunder and lightning, then going out to watch it – "chasing" storms. "As a kid I would look out at the clouds and want to know what was going on," he says. "And later, when I got a car, that opened up the whole world. The other week when storms rolled through London I got up on the roof to watch it. It's addictive."

Vicary, 27, is one of a number of storm chasers in the UK – a small, but growing group, says Ian Michaelwaite, a director of NetWeather, a forecasting company that also has an online forum where storm chasers share information and talk about those they have witnessed. Michaelwaite estimates there are around 300 storm chasers in the UK (the vast majority are men) who follow weather reports, get in their cars and go to find a storm to watch and, these days, post the photographs they take on the internet.

 

"I think more people are getting involved," says Vicary, 27, who now works as a catastrophe risk analyst for an insurance company. "On social networking sites you see a lot more photos coming up, and people talking about it. People are getting a lot more engaged."  

 

In the recent storms that hit the country, the police and the Environment Agency had to urge people not to go to the coast to watch or take photographs. In Devon, Harry Martin, 18, has been missing since 2 January, when he went out to take pictures of turbulent seas. Another student, 21-year-old Edward Laxton, had to be rescued by the RNLI after getting stuck on a jetty in Aberystwyth, where he had been taking photographs of the waves. Others were criticised for putting their children in danger: one man was pictured in newspapers holding his small daughter up to see over a sea wall before a wave crashed over, sweeping him off his feet.

 

It's easy to see the temptation. "I think as a country we are fascinated by the weather. I would say we're addicted to it," says Michaelwaite. With the recent storms, people were drawn to watch them by "the power of it, because it's not something we see very often". For others, it's the satisfaction (and sometimes financial benefit) of getting an incredible shot, or some footage, and sharing it on the internet, or getting it picked up by a news channel – several newspapers and broadcasters used footage taken by one bystander last week of part of a cliff falling into the sea at Hastings.

 

British storm chaser Paul Sherman catches up with a tornado in the US, where he runs storm-chasing tours

 

"During the wind storms and floods we've had over the last two or three weeks, we spent quite a bit of time and effort telling people not to go to the coast to photograph it," says Michaelwaite. "The last thing the emergency services need is people thinking they'll get the shot of a lifetime and putting themselves in harm's way. The main issue here is that the storms we get tend to be quite broad, very wet and cause quite a lot of tree damage – roads get blocked and you need quick emergency access. It's not really chaseable because you can't really chase something you can't avoid. It's more that it chases you."

 

In parts of America, where storm chasing is more popular and draws tourists from around the world, the sights can be spectacular. "You could be watching a little cloud in the distance that, as you follow it, grows and starts soaring skywards, and grows into an enormous cloud that looks like a wedding cake with layers," says Michaelwaite. "It starts to get illuminated from within by lightning and the centre of it goes an emerald green colour, which is where the hail core is. You can hear the hailstones rumbling. If you're in the right place, they'll put down a tornado in front of you as well as some spectacular lightning. That's the difference between here and there – the set-up over there for the clash of warm, moist air and cold, dry air, and the space to develop, creates these monster storms called supercells. What we tend to get is a trail of smaller clouds which all leach energy off each other, so none of them go dominant and do those skyscraper formations. Or very few of them – we might get one or two a year." He saw one once while he was camping with his children. "That was quite spectacular, holding on to the tent as that blew through."

 

The other difference, says Paul Sherman, a storm chaser who lives in Essex and runs the family jewellery business – as well as tornado-watching tours in the US – is the landscape and infrastructure. "In America, if we need to be in a target zone in four hours, and it's 280 miles away, we set the car at 70mph and we will get there. It's very easy to chase storms. If you're targeting a storm in Norwich and you live in the London area, that journey is going to take between two and six hours. It's frustrating. You'll turn up at a village and it takes you 10 minutes to get through, and if the storm is moving fast, it will be away from you." The other problem is the fact we are surrounded by water: "You kind of run out at the coast, whereas in America we would start in central Kansas and end up somewhere in Missouri by the end of the day because it's such a vast area."

 

Unfortunately for storm enthusiasts, he says, we just don't get the same impressive supercells and tornadoes that America's plains get. "We had supercells around June 2012, in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, which produced baseball-sized hail and tornadoes. A couple of my friends successfully chased those, but the other storms we get, the thunderstorms, are not really up to scratch to chase. What we do get, which is what we've had since October [starting with the St Jude storm on 28 October], is the low pressure systems in the winter." The Met office has suggested that December 2013 was "the stormiest December in records dating back to 1969".

 

Members of the public watch from a safe distance as waves crash against the Aberystwyth coastline on 6 January. Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA

 

Still, British storm chasers take what they can get. "Last year was fairly active," says Vicary, who has also been storm chasing in the US five times and plans to spend a month there this year. "I got about seven or eight UK chases in. I try to stick to the London area. Most of the good thunderstorms in the UK come up from France, so you can sit in Kent and watch them roll in. Around 2005, there was a big storm up in the north-east and it was windy enough to blow over some trees and big hay bales. The window of my car got shattered. I was up on a hill and saw the lightning take out the national grid. There were hailstones that were fairly big, so the car got dented."

 

Sherman says the 1987 storm was still one of the most powerful he has ever seen. "I saw a tornado in Benfleet [in Essex in 2009], and that was quite a shock. I looked at this storm coming towards me and I thought it looked like a supercell, so I got in the car and drove out, and saw the tornado. It did a lot of damage, mainly to two streets, so it was probably about 200 or 300 yards wide." He went to watch a storm about five years ago in Newhaven on the East Sussex coast, "where the waves were coming over the top of the lighthouse. We were in this car park, sheltered behind this port area, but then the police came and moved us out of there."

Storm chasing started in the US in the 1950s and 60s, says Paul Knightley, forecast manager for MeteoGroup, a forecasting company, and head of the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation. "It really started to take off in the 70s and 80s, mostly as a research thing, but increasingly as a hobby. In the mid-90s the film Twister came out and suddenly a whole new generation of people thought it looked cool. It got really busy for a time around the early 2000s, but a lot of people realised it can involve driving around, not seeing much, using a lot of fuel." But the pastime is undergoing another resurgence, mainly driven by new technology. "Now with fast mobile internet, you can see where a thunderstorm is, see your GPS position, and off you go. It has become much easier to find storms."

 

In the UK, he says: "We have between 30 and 50 tornadoes a year, but they tend to be shortlived, rapid, and more tricky in some ways to predict." The best storm he has witnessed, he thinks, was in the summer of 1996, "just northwest of Reading when a couple of friends and I went out knowing there were some storms that evening. We parked on top of a hill, which isn't necessarily the safest place to be, and sat there and waited. The storm came in and it was incredible – we had 1in-diameter hailstones, 60mph winds, continuous lightning, intense rainfall. That probably was a supercell thunderstorm."

 

Members of the public are dwarved by huge waves on a clifftop at Land's End in Cornwall. Photograph: Apex/Mike Newman

 

It seems easy to become a storm chaser these days, with no specialist equipment needed other than a smartphone, perhaps a laptop with mobile internet, and a car. There are numerous sites where people teach themselves to read weather data, and more famous storm chasers have written guides. Others discuss upcoming storms on online forums.

 

"Some guys who live up north will come down to the south coast for lightning coming from France, and a lot of us down here will go up to Lincolnshire because they always seem to get the best storms up there," says Sherman. The east Midlands, and northwards to parts of Yorkshire "tend to get the best storms", especially in the summer. For good winter storms, it is best to head for the coast. "You can pick up trends a week in advance. In the summer, you see hot air in France and Spain, which could create thunderstorms, so you get yourself on standby. Then you arrange to meet up with people, check the data on the day, pick a target area and chase the storm. It's that easy. Most people can do it now."

 

It is not, of course, without potentially fatal risks. "In America people are putting themselves in death's way to get the best shot or footage," Sherman says. Even the most experienced storm chasers can get caught out. In May last year, Tim Samaras, the respected tornado researcher and star of the Discovery Channel's Storm Chasers show, was killed, along with his 24-year-old son Paul and meteorologist friend Carl Young, in the tornado that swept through El Reno, Oklahoma. "I chased that storm and I was about a mile away from where they were," Sherman adds. But Samaras wasn't one of those chasers who took unnecessary risks: "It was just a freak of that tornado where it turned 90 degrees."

 

In this country, the biggest risks for storm chasers come from water – people too close to a stormy coast can get washed out to sea, inland "fast-flowing water just 15cm deep can take you off your feet and drown you; 30cm deep and it will float a Range Rover," says Michaelwaite – and dangerous driving.

 

"For the majority of storm chasers, the thrill isn't about the danger," says Knightley, "it's [about seeing] the atmosphere producing these amazing sights." He says he enjoys the whole experience, from analysing the data and working out where to go, to standing outdoors and witnessing the power of the natural world.

 

Not everyone can see the appeal, admits Sherman. "My wife hates it. She's a storm widow." He says that he enjoys the social side, meeting up with other storm chasers. "I think it's like hunting. Are you going to pick the right target area? Did you chase it correctly? What mistakes did you make? It's pitting your wits against mother nature."

 

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/10/storm-chasing-uk-wild-weather

[lightningsprite]

Great article...I try and storm chase a little here in the UK but would love to go out the the US...need to win the lottery first though. Paul, love the t shirt...however there's a bit of a grammar fail! (/pedant mode)!

We often see our best storms while down on the seafront..watching the lightning strikes getting closer over the sea from France and the squalls over the Isle of Wight from Milford or Barton cliffs can't be beaten :-)

[Paul Sherman]

Yes, when it was given to me a few years ago I had to look excited at the wife but my heart sank when I saw the the apostrophe - Doh

 

Tornadoes It is!

[ZONE 51]

Fantastic article very interesting!

 

Heres a satellite image of those UK June 2012 supercells as mentioned:

Edited January 11, 2014 by ElectricSnowStorm