Storm Chasing – Overview

This is an overview on our daily routine, the hotels, the van, camera gear and more.

The Daily Routine

A typical chase day starts the same way. We are responsible for our own wake-up calls and most of the hotels offer a basic breakfast. Once we leave the base city, our meeting times are generally between nine and ten in the morning.

Which is awesome unless jet lag keeps waking you at four or five o’clock.

We are responsible for bringing our bags to the van, and the driver will load them up. Then we usually have the morning briefing somewhere in the hotel. It can be one of the rooms or in the hotel lobby/conference room where they can hook up their laptop to a screen.

This way, they are able to show us the maps and information that they use to decide on where to go that day.

They often start with the link to the Storm Prediction Center which gives them a basic percentage risk of severe weather.  They use other sites to break down why these areas are at risk and narrow down where we can go to intercept a storm.

They talk about surface and high altitude winds, humidity, wind direction, shear and  temperature. One site notes the difference between temperature and dew point. In this case, the closer together they are, the more moisture there is and that was what they look for.

Between it all, they spend about thirty minutes educating us on the weather for the day and then we set off in that general direction. We could travel five miles, fifty miles or five hundred to get into the best position. Driving three hundred miles is probably about average.

And quite frankly, on days when we did several hundred miles, I barely noticed the distances.

The storms that are targeted generally don’t form until late afternoon. En route, we will stop every hour or two depending on how far we have to drive.

If we didn’t have far to go, we could explore the local area. That could mean a visit to a Walmart, a longer sit down lunch or a visit to a local site of interest. On my tours, this included sites like Garden of the Gods in Colorado, Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, Roswell in New Mexico or a buffalo and elk sanctuary in Oklahoma.

On particularly hot days, we might stop at a Dairy Queen for a while. Needless to say, the blizzard is particularly good. On the eclipse tour, we visited Monument Rocks in Kansas and took a ride on an antique carousel in Colorado. There are also a lot of abandoned houses to explore.

Once a chase begins in the mid/late afternoon or early evening, we make sure our camera gear is in hand and ready to go. As the storm develops, we usually pull over multiple times and can spend anywhere from two minutes to an hour or more in one spot depending on how the storm was shaping up.

Usually, when we get out of the van, we line up against a fence line, across a quiet road or along the edge of the road. Other times we might be in ditches, on the edge of a wheat field or on cow paths.

The one thing to watch for here is that you don’t accidentally walk in front of another camera, even if it’s not manned. Sometimes, we can be so enthralled with the sky, we start to stroll around and forget where the cameras are. I like to take photos for a time-lapse video, for example. This means I can leave my camera alone and go back to the van for something while the camera keeps shooting. It looks like the camera is just sitting on the tripod doing nothing and people can wander back and forth in front of it, not realizing that it was taking pics.

If it starts to rain or if the lightning gets too close for comfort, we load up and move to a safer spot. This is where the ability to load the van quickly can come in handy.

More often than not we chase the storms well into the evening. On average, we arrive at our hotel somewhere between nine and midnight. The hotels are usually booked later in the afternoon when they know where we might end up and often it’s a hotel that is in the direction they expected to take the next day.

 

The Vans

The vans can fit eight people. The three bench seats in the back have the capacity to fit nine, but the three middle spots are left empty so that everyone had access to a window as well as having some space for our gear.

In the lead van, the tour leader has the front seat where the laptop is set up and there is a TV monitor in both vans facing the back. It shows us the same thing that is on the laptop screen.

 

Both vans have wifi which is fairly reliable throughout the tour. Granted, there are some dead zones, especially in the northern plains.

Our luggage goes in the back with the tripods safely stowed underneath.

The second van has a driver and seven seats for the passengers (one in the front seat). The two vans generally stay together for the duration of the tour. Sometimes, there’s a special tour (photography, media etc) and while we might see them from time to time, they chased independently.

At the welcome briefing on the first day we are given two rules. No alcohol while we are chasing and seat belts must always be worn. This is enforced throughout the tour. We are also told that when they tell us to get aboard the van during a chase, there is no arguing the point. You break down your tripod and get back to the van as quickly as possible. They might see something of concern that we do not.

There is no set rotation in the seats, but each tour settles into a routine. Sometimes we would switch vans everyday, but on some tours, we stuck to one van for the whole tour. In the end, it really doesn’t matter where you sit as the best views/photos are when you get out of the van. We all took care of our own garbage and someone always had a plastic bag to spare.

 

The Hotels

The hotels I’ve stayed in at ranged from the Buzzard’s Nest in Colorado to a Best Western in Wichita to a gorgeous B&B in Sharon Springs, Kansas.

I’ve had no issues with any of them (except one…but that one was worth it for the experience). In fact, the hotels are much better than I anticipated.

The hotels are all clean and comfortable. Most have the basic breakfast layout and laundry facilities. I was surprised to find that the rooms usually always have a kettle, fridge and microwave in the room. Very convenient.

All the hotels had ample plugs for charging my electronics. One thing a lot of hotels don’t have is an elevator, so pulling up your luggage one or two flights of stairs is not uncommon. (No need to haul your tripod up with you. It can stay in the van)

 

Camera Gear

Not everyone is interested in taking pictures or videos of the storms. Some just want to watch. For them, a cell phone or point and shoot camera for the highlights is perfect.

For those of us who want to take pictures and/or video, there are some things I have figured out along the way that you might find helpful.

A DSLR or mirrorless camera

– I currently shoot with a Nikon Z-7 and two Olympus OMD mirrorless cameras. I generally use two and have the third as a spare.

– I tried using a GoPro Hero 6 in 2018 and found it wasn’t worth the hassle and wasn’t that great in low light.

Wide angle lens

– I find I use wide angle lenses almost exclusively. I have a 15mm f2.0 Laowa for my Nikon and a 14-28mm f2.8 Zuiko lens for the Olympus. I use a 24-200mm for all-around use during the day. While I do bring a cheap, light weight 150-300mm telephoto for my Olympus, I find I rarely use it. I leave my heavier 200-800mm at home.

Lots of batteries

– The one thing I learned on my first tour in 2017 was that one or two batteries per camera was not enough. The following year, I had five per camera. By 2022, I had upgraded the cameras and found the batteries had more capacity, so I got away with three per camera. I may or may not go through all three batteries but there have been long chase days when I’ve gone through two and was on the third (usually on the camera taking time-lapses).

Chargers and Power

– All the cameras I have now can charge the battery while it’s in the camera, so I only bring one external charger each. Between the two charging sources, I never had a problem having all the batteries at 100% at the start of the day.

– A power bank is a convenient item to have. I use mine to keep my cell phone charged in the van but it can be used to charge other items as well like the camera battery or lightning trigger. In 2023, Tempest Tours introduced a USB charging port in each row (one per row).

Memory cards

– I had thirteen 16 GB SDHC cards in 2017 and had to reuse some of them multiple times. At the end of the day, I saved the photos to my laptop and a 2TB external drive. That ensured I had two copies of the photos and could reuse the cards. When the internet in the hotel was fast enough, I’d upload my favourite shots to the Cloud.

– After a poor experience with Lexar, I now have dozen 32 GB or 64 GB Sandisk Extreme Pro UHS II cards for my Olympus cameras. I use 3 Sony XQD 120 GB cards and one 256 CF Express card for my Nikon. On a single tour, I likely would not fill all of them, but I generally do more than one tour in a row, so I still bring my 4TB external drives to save copies every night and reuse the cards if necessary.

Lightning trigger

– I didn’t have one on my first tour where I ended up just clicking the shutter release continuously and hoping to catch a bolt. A lightning trigger will activate the shutter when lightning is detected so you can set the camera on your tripod and stand back to enjoy the show. I asked the others about the triggers and one brand that was recommended was called Pluto. I bought mine for just over $100 from B&H Photo in the US. I used it a lot in 2018 and loved it. It is connected to an app on my cell phone.

– In 2022, my new Olympus cameras have Pro-Capture and Live Composite modes which both work well for catching lightning bolts. I also bought the Lightning Bug trigger which doesn’t require a cell phone to operate like the Pluto.

– As well, you can download a lightning trigger on your cell phone. For the Android, it’s a buffer type trigger called Lightning Camera. You hold it up, keep it steady and it will buffer photos continuously up to five seconds. When you see a lightning strike, you press the button and it saves about a hundred shots. I save them all right away and set up for the next bolt. I usually go through them later to sort out the best shots and delete the rest. Sometimes I will make .gifs out of some of them.

 

For iPhones, there used to be a trigger app, but in 2022, no one seemed to be able to fine it or anything similar. Apps can come and go so much, it’s best to google ‘lightning trigger’ for your type of phone, and if there’s an option, you should be able to find it.

– I took this shot with my Galaxy S8 cell phone.

Tripod

– At night, one way to capture the lightning was with long exposures so a tripod was essential. I had a lightweight tripod that was fine for my camera and I could leave it under the seat. Others had larger tripods that could be left in the back of the van and accessed easily enough when we stopped.

– I now have two Manfrotto 290 Lite tripods with quick release legs.

Remote

– In order to take those longer exposures, a cable release means that you can trigger the shutter without vibration. The Pluto trigger that I purchased is also a remote trigger.

Extra storage

– I now use two 4 TB Seagate external drives. I shoot in RAW and 4 TB is more than enough space to store all the photos. Having a lot of extra storage is really only an issue with me because I take time-lapses. That can mean taking thousands of photos a day, so it’s not hard to fill up the external drives after three or four weeks of chasing.

Miscellaneous

Since 2018, I have used a fanny pack so that I have easy access to batteries, cards and more. It meant I didn’t have had to abandon some good photo opportunities in order to go back to the van to get a card or battery.

I also have a rain cover for both cameras. I was using the disposable type before but tried this one and found it works great. With the new cameras, I find I don’t use them as much as all three are weather sealed and we rarely stay long once it starts to rain.

Random Hints and Tidbits

– It’s not hard to eat a lot of junk food while chasing. On my first tour, I was a little overwhelmed by all the wide range of possibilities lining the aisles in the stores and wanted to try them all. I put on more than five pounds. On subsequent tours, I practiced a little more restraint, going for granola/protein bars instead of chocolate bars. I also limited soft drinks, ordered sandwiches rather than hamburgers and went for walks in the morning when I could. Granted, my will power does fluctuate.

– When you get to the hotel in the evening after a great storm, your first instinct will be to stay up and look/work on your photos. Before you know it, it’s three or four in the morning. I recommend resisting the urge. Take a quick look at them, perhaps download them to your laptop so that you have a second copy safely stored and then go to bed. There is plenty of time in the morning and/or in the van to look at the photos on your laptop/tablet.

– On a long day, we could spend as much as twelve hours in the van. Please don’t wear anything that has a heavy scent. In the close quarters of the van, it could be suffocating. The same applies to bug spray. Wait until you leave the van to apply it.

– Be aware that bathroom breaks can be limited once the chase begins and using a corn field can sometimes be the only option. The tour leaders will remind you to limit what you drink in the afternoon and warn when a bathroom break might be the last one before intercepting a storm. It’s a good idea to have some tissues or a roll of travel toilet paper.

– Make time to do a laundry whenever there is down time. In the hot weather, you probably don’t want to be wearing the same sweat soaked shirt every day. I usually bring a complete change of clothes to cover three days which ensures I always have something clean to wear. On shorter tours, this would probably last the whole time without having to do a major laundry. On the eleven day tour, I would do one big laundry in the middle of the tour.

– If you are strapped for time when it comes to laundry, you can always put the iron on steam and freshen up an item easily enough. Also, it only takes a few minutes to rinse out an item in the sink and have it dry by morning. I wrote about my laundry routine here.

– At first, I wore a combination of lightweight pants and capris while chasing, but after 2018, I decided to always wear pants and hiking boots on chase days. We can sometimes walk through talk grass (which means ticks are possible), and at one stop, the wheat impaled my calves and shoes pretty good. In 2019, we came across insects they called chiggers. Their bites get really REALLY itchy and can last for days, even weeks. Now, I put an elastic band around my pant leg at the top of my hiking boots. This worked well to keep anything from crawling up inside the pant leg in 2022.

– For insect repellent that works with chiggers and ticks, I highly recommend Watkins Great Outdoors Repellant. It’s a cream, and before a chase, I apply it to my lower legs and behind my knees (where the chiggers love to go). Also, this UK cream is the bomb when it comes to anti-itch.

– In 2018, I did three tours and a self drive vacation in between. This meant I had more stuff with me than I needed while chasing. Since the base hotel is the one we return to, you can usually leave anything you won’t need there (at least in Denver).

 

Most of all, just have fun. The weather dictates the tour. You could have a tour with intercepts every single night or every second night. You could see ten tornadoes or none. You could see spectacular thunderstorms almost every night or only a couple in a week. You can go three days and see nothing and then see the most spectacular lightning display at sunset that just blows your mind.

Every tour is different.

You never know what each day may bring. It’s all part of the experience.

 

 

Go to Table of Contents for 2017 Storm Chasing season

Go to Table of Contents for Great American Eclipse

Go to Table of Contents for 2018 Storm Chasing season

Go to Table of Contents for 2019 Storm Chasing season

Go to Table of Contents for 2022 Storm Chasing season

Go to Table of Contents for 2023 Storm Chasing season