As soon as Mark De Bruin had a car and a license, he was chasing storms.
“Since I was a little kid, I would always go out on the porch and watch whatever storm came by my house, and I always just found them so fascinating,” said De Bruin, a junior meteorology major at Iowa State University. “A lot of us just have this unexplainable lifelong passion for storms and severe weather … Honestly, I can’t really explain it.”
De Bruin is one of many storm chasers in the Midwest. Some chase to experience and photograph the beauty of tornadoes and supercells, while others conduct research on severe weather phenomena. Storm chasers, as well as skywarn spotters, are the eyes and ears of the National Weather Service (NWS), providing on-the-ground information for weather warnings that can save lives.
The severe weather warning system relies on three factors: radar, environmental observations and spotters, said Rich Kinney, a warning coordination meteorologist. Kinney works at the NWS Forecast Office in the Quad Cities, which covers 36 counties across central Illinois, northeast Missouri and eastern Iowa, including Linn and Johnson County.
“If you take any one of those three factors out of the equation, that would not be good. Spotters are vitally important to really telling us what’s going on,” he said.
The most dangerous severe weather events are EF3, EF4 and EF5 tornadoes, which have over 135 mph winds, though these are rare, Kinney said. Most tornadoes in Iowa are EFU (unknown), EF0 or EF1 tornadoes, with wind speeds up to 112 mph. Those last from a few seconds to five minutes and aren’t as destructive.
De Bruin witnessed his first tornado when he was 17.
“I saw it in my hometown of Pella, Iowa,” he said. “Since then I’ve chased 30 tornadoes in the last five years.”
There have been 892 tornadoes in Iowa from 2006 to 2021, causing 19 deaths and 227 injuries, NWS data shows. Tornadoes have caused over half a billion dollars in property and crop damage since 2006, typically around $5 million a year, excluding outliers.
Storm chasers and skywarn spotters reported 158 tornadoes of those 892 tornadoes to the NWS.
“With the storm chasers in our area, they give us great data,” Kinney said. “Instant data, right up to the minute, so we can look at that radar, and compare it to what they’re telling us in the field.”
There have been 17 EF3 or EF4 tornadoes since 2006, and only one EF5, a 15-mile-long tornado that struck Butler County in 2008. In 26 minutes, that tornado killed nine people, injured 50 and caused $75 million in damage. Another EF4 tornado in 2008 lasted 45 minutes.
“We’ve actually had tornadoes in our area in every single month of the year,” Kinney said. Some of Kinney’s coworkers also chase storms, but he doesn’t.
One tornado hit Iowa City in April 2006, an EF2 with 155 mph winds. The tornado lasted eight minutes, injuring 30 people and damaging 1,016 residential and 35 commercial buildings.
Storm chase season lasts from March to September, De Bruin said, though his group has chased even later into the year. Peak season starts in late May until June. His friends and other meteorology students have traveled as far as Colorado, sometimes spending a full week storm chasing.
De Bruin is a self-taught storm chaser. He learned how to read long-range weather forecasting models and different chasing techniques, like positioning yourself around storms and planning escape routes, from YouTube and other online resources.
He began locally, and with more experience, expanded his range. He plans his chase days in advance, searching for supercells or deep-rotating updrafts that can produce thunderstorms and tornadoes.
“Supercells are like living beings. They have all of these different behaviors, and you can recognize them in real time,” he said. “The storms are dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, so it’s important that you learn how to forecast and how the storms behave.”
Once his team has picked a target area, they gather their cameras and safety equipment, and leave in the morning. For hours, the sky is clear with calm, white clouds. But by the afternoon, thunderstorms roll overhead.
“When you are close to a tornado, it’s a very interesting sound,” he said. “Most of them actually sound more like waterfalls because they’re going through cornfields or forests, and all of that rush of wind in one spot makes it sound like a really, really loud waterfall.”
But the riskiest part of storm chasing isn’t the tornado, De Bruin said. It’s driving. High winds, flying debris, hydroplaning, distracted drivers and more can make crashes and collisions fairly common.
“We have had a couple close calls. Most of them were driving-related,” he said. “And it’s the lightning as well because lightning can strike at any time, and you have no control over where it’s going to hit.”
They won’t leave their vehicles when there’s a high volume of lightning strikes. On one chase in Oklahoma, a supercell shot down lighting every few seconds within a mile of their caravan.
“It sounded like cannon shots,” he said. “We did not get out, ’cause we were not going to take any chances on that.”
In 2018, De Bruin tracked an EF3 tornado in Pella, Iowa. Five miles long and 800 yards wide, the tornado developed just north of Pella, traveling southeast for 12 minutes. Thirteen people were injured when the tornado crossed a Vermeer Corporation manufacturing building. The storm resulted in $120 million worth of damages.
“It came over the building and ripped it up, and threw bricks and pieces of roof everywhere. And basically it destroyed that plant completely, and broke down all of the walls, and tore up the cars in the parking lot,” De Bruin said.
“It was a wide mix of emotions, and that happens a lot in storm chasing, because initially I was very excited to be seeing multiple tornadoes that were touching down and not hitting anything,” he continued. “As it came closer to the town, and it destroyed that building, it quickly turned to fear for the people whose lives were being impacted at that time. And then also fear for myself, because I needed to make sure that I was staying safe and not putting myself in danger.”
His group brings work gloves, closed-toed shoes and safety goggles in case they need to help with search and rescue. De Bruin is also trained in CPR. In situations where every second counts, storm chasers can arrive before first responders. But so far, first aid hasn’t been necessary.
De Bruin’s chases are for first-hand experience and photo/video documentation. He’s training to become a severe weather meteorologist and research tornado development. In the meteorology community, he explained, they don’t completely understand why some supercells produce tornadoes and others don’t. He wants to help improve forecasting, so people can take shelter when needed.
“The problem is that tornadoes are relatively rare, and to get observations close to a tornado, that is very, very difficult,” Kinney said. “We’ve made incremental progress, and we have a little bit better understanding of the mechanics of particular airstreams and how they interact.”
But there still needs to be more research, especially into how climate change affects development and frequency. While climate change can increase hurricane intensity, heavy precipitation and flooding, it’s unclear how it affects tornadoes.
“If you have warmer temperatures, you’ll have more moisture in the atmosphere, which is good for severe storms. But you may have more cloud cover, so you’re holding down temperatures,” Kinney said. “There’s some conflicting things in terms of the ingredients to get severe storms. So that’s why a lot more research is needed.”
But tornadoes are infrequent in Iowa. Flash flooding and straight-line winds, like the August 2020 derecho (though not always so intense), are more common, Kinney said.
“They don’t necessarily get as much attention, but they’re certainly a big threat around here,” he said. “Sometimes with these events you can get a dual threat. You’ve got the bigger, broader overall straight-line, thunderstorm winds, and then embedded small tornado circulations.”
De Bruin originally planned to stay home during the derecho. But when he saw a line of severe storms swoop across western Iowa, he packed up his gear.
“I had no idea that it was going to be that strong,” he said.
You can’t chase a derecho. The winds will easily outrun your car, or flip it over. Instead, De Bruin parked his car outside of Newton, Iowa — far away from trees and power lines — and oriented his car into the winds.
“When you set up for a storm like that, there is no way that you can go back and get out of the way. If you are set up to take this storm, then that’s what you have to do,” he said.
The radar showed winds reaching 70 to 100 mph. When the line passed over him, the sky darkened, and a wall of dust blew from a green shelf cloud. The wind and rain flew near horizontally, flattening the cornfield around him.
“It lasted for at least 15 or 20 minutes, which was probably the longest duration of severe wind that I’ve ever been in,” he said. “One of the first houses that I came across had a massive tree snapped off, and had fallen off in front of the house.”
Derechos are products of the warm seasons, caused by high-pressure weather systems that create strong downdrafts. Sometimes a cluster of downdraft winds hits the ground and races ahead of the storm.
Derechos occur when these winds move across 250 miles of land with wind speeds of at least 58 mph.
In December 2021, another derecho tore across Iowa — “an unprecedented and historic event,” the NWS said. It was the first derecho in December anywhere in the United States, and it unofficially set the record for the most tornadoes (and the most EF2 or stronger tornadoes) in Iowa on a single day since 1950.
“If it’s warming up into the 40s or 50s in December, then it’s time to pay attention to the weather,” Kinney said. “To get a derecho in December? That’s an even more rare occurrence.”
De Bruin and his team documented the December derecho in Jefferson, Iowa.
“We had lightning shooting all across the sky, just constant lightning, and we could see the storm coming at us very quickly,” he said.
The winds hit the town, knocking out power lines and transformers in “power flashes,” or bright, colorful electric discharge.
“We started seeing these power flashes one by one all the way down this line that was coming at us,” De Bruin said.
A few tornadoes touched down around Jefferson, but the storm passed over them, heading north.
Most chases aren’t that exciting, though. Around 80 to 90 percent of De Bruin’s pursuits are “busts,” and the team returns empty-handed. That’s his main complaint with the 1996 movie Twister, starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, about a group of storm chasers in Oklahoma (though a few of the most memorable scenes were filmed in Iowa).
“I remember watching that when I was a kid. As far as the general idea of storm chasing, they nailed it on the head,” he said. “But what they don’t show in the movie is all of the failures that come with storm chasing.”
Kinney also has a few gripes with Twister.
“One of my favorite parts is when, I think it’s Bill Paxton’s character is out there kind of sniffing around, you know, looking at the dirt and the grass, and trying to sense if there’s going to be some sort of a tornado occurring. I don’t think we really do that,” he said. “There are crews out there that are doing this on a regular basis, exactly what you saw in that movie. That’s part of the research process. Now their safety practices are going to be much more robust than what we saw in the movie.”
As the storm season begins, Kinney advises everyone to make a severe weather plan, know where the nearest emergency shelters are and have multiple forms of communication available: internet, television, radio, etc. You can also become a skywarn spotter by taking the NWS two-hour training course, either in-person or online. If you want to chase storms, it’s best to accompany a professional, he said.
De Bruin remembers chasing a supercell in Minnesota, just as the snow and ice had begun to melt off. They caught sight of a mesocyclone, a rotating section of thunderstorm between two and six miles in diameter.
“This storm was absolutely gorgeous,” he said. “It looked like a stack of pancakes … and then just this spectacular anvil cloud overhead. We just sat there, and we watched the whole storm, like several miles wide spin over top of us, and it was really, really awesome to see.”
Adria Carpenter is a multimedia journalist for Little Village, and shares that strange fascination with severe weather. When she was young, she’d sit on the porch with a bag of popcorn and watch thunderstorms. Lightning once struck about a meter away from her. The brief, hot flash was the brightest thing she’s ever seen. And ‘Twister,’ a childhood staple, came out the year she was born. This article was originally published in Little Village issue 304.
