When the sky gets dark and wild clouds begin to race across the horizon, most people start running in the opposite direction. After all, tornadoes and lightning storms are no joke; they claim the lives of many people each year.
Incredibly, however, while almost everyone is hurriedly packing their car to leave town before the storm hits, a small group of adventurers are heading directly toward the storm — armed with nothing more than cameras and radars, and utterly defenseless against the storm’s wrath.
Meet the storm chasers.
The father of the storm-chasing movement was David Hoadley (born 1938), the founder of StormTrack magazine. Hoadley began chasing storms in 1956 in his home state of North Dakota. However, storm chasing only gained widespread popularity with a man named Neil B. Ward (1914–1972), who, beginning in 1961, used the Oklahoma Highway Patrol radio to help him track and study storms.
The first coordinated group storm chase was organized in 1969 by the Alberta Hail Project, a research project looking for ways to suppress hail. The project involved then-state-of-the-art meteorological equipment attached to rugged vehicles and nifty contraptions specially built on the fronts of vehicles to catch the rock-hard balls of hail often seen during a storm. Operators at a radar site directed the storm chasers right into the heart of a ferocious thunderstorm. The operation was a success and a new era had dawned for storm chasers around the world.
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