Texas Pages

June 14, 1992

RIDERS ON THE STORM
When violent weather rumbles across West Texas, the storm stalkers pile into their Chase Mobile and head for the clouds.

By Bill Marvel
Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News

It's a strange way to spend a vacation, looking for trouble.
Tim Marshall and Carson Eads have been driving steadily westward
across the High Plains of West Texas all day, scanning the sky.
Now, afternoon thunderheads have started to pop up, first way off
to the southwest, somewhere down around Carlsbad, N.M., and now just to
the north, up near Lovington.
Mr. Marshall watches the nearest storm thrusting up and up until it
mushrooms at the top, a colossal blue-gray cloud tower edged in gold
against a bronze sky. "That one,' he says.
Mr. Eads wheels the Chase Mobile around in the median, and we are
headed back north, toward a rendezvous with the storm. A Chevy Blazer
bristling with antennas, the Chase Mobile is packed with radio gear,
television set, cameras, tripods, a laptop computer.
A voice crackles over the radio: "Where are you, Carson?'
It is Sam Barricklow, somewhere off to the south, chasing another
storm in the same band. Tim Marshall tells him we have a better
prospect and are changing directions. Mr. Barricklow decides to follow.
We are not alone out here. Scattered across West Texas this
afternoon there must be a dozen other chasers stalking various storms,
each hoping his storm is the most spectacular, the most violent, the
best.
There are people who will drive hundreds of miles just to watch a
bird, chase an old train, capture a rare butterfly, find some
astonishing thing or another, experience it, photograph it, somehow
commit it to memory.
And then there are storm chasers.
When most sensible people are ducking for shelter or fleeing for
their lives, these people are driving right for the heart of the heart
of the storm, squinting through the windshield wipers, listening to the
local weather radio.
The more violent the storm, the better. An ominous, roiling turmoil
of cloud? Wonderful, wonderful. A sinister lowering, laced around with
lightning and hail? Super. A funnel? Almost perfect. A tornado churning
across the countryside? Bingo! The Holy Grail! Heaven itself!
No one remembers a chaser ever being killed by a storm. The biggest
hazards are livestock on the highway and running into other chasers on
country roads.
There are hundreds of them -- Stormtrack, the magazine that Tim
Marshall edits for storm chasers, has some 500 subscribers scattered
around the country. Instead of vacations in the Bahamas or the Rockies,
come spring they head for Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas. Because the
weather's right.
Walk into a Turkey, Texas, convenience store, or a Colorado City
Dairy Queen, or the 6-Day Inn in Lubbock in April and May, and you'll
see them, stocking up on Ralston Party Mix and Gatorade, huddled over
road maps, pausing a moment or two in their headlong dash into the
storm.
Besides Tim Marshall, a meteorologist and engineer from Lewisville,
Mr. Barricklow, owner of a Garland electronics firm, and Carson Eads,
who works for him, there are: a husband-and-wife team of forecasters
from the Weather Channel in Atlanta; a San Antonio inventor and
rancher; a professional photographer, also from San Antonio; and a
University of Western Ontario business graduate. Later tonight, when
the storms have played out, they will converge on Lubbock to rest up
for tomorrow's storms.
But now, the chase is on.
Talking to the storm
In a sense, Tim Marshall has been chasing this one all week, via
computer, watching weather patterns unfold over Japan, the North
Pacific, Alaska, tracking the wind flow down over Washington, Idaho,
Wyoming. By midweek, he knew that this weekend would be good, or as good
as it's been this year.
After the record set in 1991 -- 1,133 tornadoes -- and despite
abundant rains, this year has been a bust. Really violent storms, the
kind that produce tornadoes, have been few and far between. Last year,
Mr. Marshall photographed 29 tornadoes, his best year ever. This year,
he's photographed one, "in the jungles of southeast Oklahoma.' Chasers,
he says, have had to make do with practically any cloud that has come
along.
We turn off on one of the network of side roads that crisscross the
oil fields and zigzag our way toward the storm. Curtains of rain fall
in the distance, and a broad expanse of cloud base spreads outward,
almost as flat as the High Plains themselves. Over our heads,
shimmering silver tubes of cloud hover in the air, like fuzzy fish.
"Look at that structure,' Mr. Marshall says.
Then he is out of the car, setting up tripods and cameras, pointing
them toward a blunt, charcoal-gray mass that extends downward from the
cloud base. Watch this formation for a moment, and gradually it becomes
apparent that the whole thing is revolving slowly, majestically, like a
giant wheel in the sky.
What we are looking at, Mr. Marshall explains, is the wall cloud,
the bottom of a huge tube of warm, moist air that is spiraling straight
up through the storm, perhaps 35,000 or 40,000 feet. This is the
storm's engine, the very center of the storm's violence. If a tornado
forms, it will drop down out of the wall cloud.
But no tornado will snake down this afternoon. Tim Marshall is
talking into his tape recorder. But he is really addressing the storm,
almost preaching to it: "Hold together, now, hold together. . . . Look
at that! This is beautiful! Carson, I think we've got a funnel. But
it's not holding together . . . aw, just can't do it. . . . '
The wall cloud breaks up, reforms, then breaks up again. Still, it
is an amazing sight hanging over the flailing oil pumps.
Catching the show
Nobody knows who was the first to chase tornadoes as an avocation.
The National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., had teams on the
road by the mid-1970s, but those were professionals, scientists and
students photographing, probing with portable radar, trying to place a
package of instruments in the path of the storm.
Meantime, a few amateurs had been active here and there. David
Hoadley, who now lives in Virginia just outside of Washington, D.C., is
sometimes called the father of storm chasers, though he doesn't
particularly care for the title. "I started in 1956, so this is my 36th
year. But I didn't see my first tornado until 1962.'
He was hooked at the age of 8, the afternoon his father walked into
a Bismarck, N.D., movie theater, whispered, "Come see a show that's
much better than the show in here,' and pulled him outside. Bismarck
had been devastated by a passing storm.
In the early days, Mr. Hoadley did his own forecasting. He got
pretty good at it, and later he would drop in on the lab in Norman to
trade guesses with the experts.
The relationship between professional meteorologists and storm
chasers has been mixed, but on the whole cordial. Many of the
professionals are also chasers, and many of the amateurs are so good at
predicting and finding storms that they earn the respect of the
professionals.
"I think we have a problem because of the sheer numbers that are
going out,' says Dr. Charles A. Doswell, a research meteorologist at
Norman and a member of the lab's original chase team. "It's getting to
where you have to have a ticket to stand alongside the road.
"But guys like Sam, Carson, Tim -- the serious ones -- are a real
help. They've been real valuable over the years. They provide video,
they document events. They're trustworthy. When they say they've seen
something, we believe them.'
Dr. Doswell is finishing a bowl of oatmeal in a motel coffee shop
in Lubbock. With his mutton-chop whiskers, he looks like Wilford
Brimley.
Tim Marshall has already jacked his laptop into the phone in his
room and has the latest weather bureau data.
Invariably, talk turns to the slim pickings this year. With June in
view and summer weather patterns already building to the east, this
weekend will be just about the last chance for a big outbreak. And the
signs are only so-so.
Various theories float around the table: Particles from last year's
eruption of Mount Pinatubo are cooling things off. El Nino, the Pacific
current off South America, is screwing up tropical weather patterns.
Global warming. The luck of the draw.
"Nobody really understands the weather,' Dr. Doswell says with a
shrug.
But Sam Barricklow is trying. He is bent over a weather map, at
work with a box of Crayolas, coloring in the fronts, the highs and
lows. Red and green lines slew this way and that.
He trades maps with Tim Marshall.
"It looks like somewhere up near Shamrock,' Mr. Marshall says. He
proposes that we stop at the Lubbock office of the National Weather
Service, then head toward Amarillo and turn east.
A dozen chasers have already gathered at the Weather Service, plus
an NBC news team. They will dog our heels all day. Somebody in New
York, Mr. Marshall explains, imagines that you can put a news team on a
plane and fly them to West Texas, where they will photograph a tornado
and fly back the same evening. It's like pointing a gun out the window
and trying to shoot a fly.
While they wait for the weather patterns to unfold, storm chasers
and meteorologists watch the radar, study satellite pictures, chart
fronts, look at each other's color slides and trade stories.
Alan Moller, chief forecaster at the National Weather Service in
Fort Worth, is sipping coffee. A member of NSSL's original chase team
along with Charles Doswell, he has been chasing now for 20 years.
"What I've seen in these last 20 years is absolutely amazing,' he
says. "You see one of these tremendous storms producing softball-sized
hail and a tornado with 300-mile-an-hour winds. And it's nothing more
than air and moisture.' He waves his arms in the air. "It's as
insubstantial as this.
"If meteorologists have never chased storms,' he says, "they don't
know storms. Chasing storms transcends any amount of book learning.
"Chuck and I have been out two weeks. We've seen some awesome
storms, but we've seem only one brief touchdown. We've been seeing them
repeatedly break up. We can't figure out why.'
Shortly after noon, word goes out. A tornado "box' -- a watch area
-- has been issued for extreme southeastern Colorado and a corner of
the Texas Panhandle. Within a few minutes everybody is out into the
parking lot and into the cars.
By 2:30, we are on the road headed north, Carson Eads' Chase Mobile
in the lead. NBC News is second. Then come Alan Moller and Charles
Doswell, then Patrick Kerrin, the recent graduate from Canada. This
trip is his graduation present to himself.
Next comes Bill Lende, the San Antonio inventor and rancher, and
Ruby Williamson, the photographer. They are fascinated by what Mr.
Lende calls "transient phenomena.' In April last year, they camped out
on a mountainside in Costa Rica to witness and photograph a volcanic
eruption. This is the season for tornadoes. Next month, they'll head
for Alaska to watch the salmon run.
Tim Marshall looks back over the line of cars and calls it "a
caravan of dreams.'
Breaking through
By late afternoon, we arrive at the base of a particularly promising
storm. It spins out a wall cloud, then breaks up. We are about to move
on to the next storm when the wall cloud forms again.
We drift southeastward with the storm, stopping to photograph, then
moving on when the rains close in. The storm throws out one wall cloud
after another. We photograph, drive, photograph, drive. Late in the
afternoon, we find ourselves at a crossroads, watching the lowest,
largest wall cloud of all moving up the valley. A steady wind -- 17
knots -- blows at our backs, and the grass is bent in the direction of
the storm. "In five minutes,' Mr. Marshall says, "this air will be up
in that cloud.'
But the cloud breaks up again, and with dark coming on, we decide
to drive into the nearby town of Turkey to refuel and stock up on junk
food for the drive back to Lubbock. Turkey is the birthplace of Bob
Wills, the late king of Western swing.
Local storm spotters are on guard at the outskirts of Turkey,
keeping an eye on the storm that has just passed. But the main show
seems to be over.
Fueled and restocked, we start south. We are barely out of town
when the rain begins, gently at first but with increasing force. Small
hailstones spatter against the side of the car.
The rain lets up, then resumes with a vengeance. Then hail, larger
this time, rattles against the roof. Wind buffets the Chase Mobile, and
the sides of the road disappear in a white blur. This is tense.
Anything could be out there waiting for us in this storm.
Finally, we pass through the hail and the rain into clear air and
into Palo Duro Canyon. The ground is littered with hail drifts.
In the deep blue twilight, the storm rises up behind us, still
building, overtopping itself, spreading. Pink lightning flashes in its
depths and skips across the surface.
Shivering in the cold, we set up cameras in the gathering dark for
one final round of pictures.
The radio is chattering about a possible funnel cloud, but that is
many miles south. In the meantime, this is simply too beautiful, too
awesome to pass up.
A couple days later, Sam Barricklow is reviewing his video of this
last storm. The camera pans over dense, dark cloud mass, illuminated by
flashes of lightning as though by a strobe. In one of those flashes,
his eye catches something. He rewinds and stops the frame.
There, moving in the sudden light, is the unmistakable form of a
tornado: wall cloud, funnel and a debris whirl at the surface. It had
been there all along. We just hadn't seen it.
As Tim Marshall says: "We're really storm chasers. The tornado is
just a bonus.'http://www.dallasnews.com/