Technology and Experience

StormTours.com leverages its success with a combination of rock-solid experience and technological innovation. Our storm chase vehicles are equipped with state-of-the-art computer and communication systems for access to real-time weather information from anywhere within the United States.

level II radarWe employ four different types of Doppler radar packages with redundant communication backbones to receive live data from either satellite or cellular networks. We can overlay our exact location on top of these live weather maps with our quad-tracking GPS system so we always have a live view of our location, the road network around us as well as the radar display. If that isn’t enough, then we can just simply look out the window.

In other words, all this technology is amazing and it’s very useful in the hands of our highly skilled team. However, the best judgements are often made from gut feeling that can only be derived from the years of experience that our team members have.

When we are actively engaging a storm, we’ll display the live weather information from our main computer system on overhead monitors in the passenger area of our vehicles, so as a tour guest you’ll also be able to see what the storm looks like on radar. We’ll also have a lot of radio communication running and we’ll pipe this audio through our vehicles speaker system, so you’ll be able to hear all communication networks that we participate in.

We’ll also depend on you! That’s right, you’ll be a part of our storm team during the chase because only our passengers have the ability to view out of the rear windows that our team members up front have difficulty seeing. How will you know what to look for? We just hope you’re paying attention during our storm spotting and structure identification sessions!

The Day Begins

We have a simple saying, “Early to bed, Early to rise - It’s the only way to stormy skies,” and it’s the truth, although we’re not always early to bed you can almost count on a few early mornings. Imagine a day when we have a 500 mile drive waiting for us and we need to arrive in the target area by 4:00 p.m. for storm initiation. That means that we may be leaving our hotel as early as 5:00 a.m., sometimes even a bit earlier.

We’ll meet each morning near the lobby of the hotel, which will usually include a continental breakfast of cereals, fruit, grain muffins, waffles, juice and of course the ever so important coffee. Once our storm team has completed their early forecast analysis we’ll discuss the day’s outlook with our tour group and let everyone know what the general plan for the day is. If it’s a non-chase day, we’ll likely be able to make that determination the night before and allow you to have a late morning, or what most would consider a “normal” morning.
Once we leave the hotel the chase officially starts, even though we won’t be seeing any storm activity until that evening. Storms usually fire during the late afternoon hours, often around 6:00 p.m. We’ll try our best to find time for at least a meal during the day, so it’s recommended that you bring some snacks on the trip with you in-case you get hungry or need to eat. Please be sure to use only containers that can be completely sealed though, we take pride in keeping our vans as clean as possible so the next tour group will also be able to enjoy them just as much as your group did.

texas tornado

As we approach the mid-afternoon hours, the day’s setup will start becoming more defined and we’ll likely be seeing an increasing cloud field along the dryline. We’ll closely monitor this area for rapid storm development and when we do get a developing storm we’ll target that storm and plan our interception strategy.

This is when the real fun begins. As we approach our targeted storm its structure will become increasingly more defined. We’ll have to scout for the best locations to view the business end of the supercells that we encounter and then we’ll make several short hops, each time being able to stop and view the storm in great detail. At the end of the day, we’ll go to our hotel and get as much sleep as possible before repeating the process all over again.

Hotels
Lodging is included in your tour fare and we do our best to stay at only nationally branded hotels such as Comfort Inn, Hampton Inn, Holiday Inn and other hotels within this class. However, there may be occasions when we are chasing in a very rural part of Tornado Alley that we’ll be faced with a decision of either driving several hundred miles to get to a moderately sized town with better hotels, or having to rough it out in a smaller town with less hotel options to choose from. It all depends on the situation we are faced with. If the following day’s storms are expected to be in the general direction of a bigger town, then we’ll likely choose that option. If they are in the other direction, we may opt to stay in the smaller town.
 
Meals
Our choice of meals will also evolve around the chase itself. On very active chase days we will have less time for meals than we would on clear weather days. On these active chase days we’ll try to make an “all in one stop,” meaning that we’ll try to find a place where we can fuel up the vehicles and grab a quick meal at the same time. Just about every town in Tornado Alley has the usual flare of American styled fast food, and many of these fast food places are located within truck stops along America’s vast interstate road network. And for you veggie lovers, many fast food places offer a decent menu of vegetarian choices.

On clear weather days, we’ll usually eat a lot better than we do on active chase days. In fact, we might even eat more than a single meal throughout the entire day! If that sounds scary to you, then storm chasing might not be your best bet.

We’ll be perfectly honest – storm chasing is what we are doing. And, we’re sure that there are so called “storm chasing companies” that will be happy to trade your hard earned money for an easy drive across the country and include a lot of meal stops, but with considerably less storm action than what we’re out there for. If you want to chase storms, then you’re in the right place! After all our team hasn’t earned the reputation of being die-hard storm chasers because they like to spend more time along the side of the road as opposed to being on the road and aggressively in-pursuit of the world’s most severe storms. Be prepared for an adventure!
 

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