Tri-State Tornado, 101 years ago on 18 March 1925.

 March 18th will go down in history for the Tri-State Tornado of 18 March1925.  This site will take you to a neat GIS Story map.  This is the best source of information out there.  A map from Wikipedia:

For more info see 1925 Tri-State tornado - Wikipedia

and 100 years ago this week, nearly 700 people were killed in the deadliest U.S. tornado | PBS News

Tri-State Tornado

I recently read this book if paper is more to your liking.

Finally, I worked with a student on Storm Chasing and you can read the paper here or here.

Tornado Chasing and Bill Paxton RIP

It is sort of ironic that Bill Paxton, star of Twister died this weekend AND we had a tornado in Conway, Massachusetts.  It was the movie that prompted me and students in Recreation Geography to study storm chasing and deliver a paper at the Northeastern Recreation Research Symposium.

The paper abstract is "Tours devoted to tornado storm chasing have become popular in recent years, especially with the emergence of many profit and non-profit storm chasing organizations. While most literature in risk recreation has been directed toward rock climbing or other high-risk outdoor recreation activities, tours devoted to storm chasing are quite unlike these traditional activities. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of these organizations from information collected in a mailed survey. Areas to be discussed are specific tour details for each company, basic demographics of tour attendees, and other areas of tour requirements."

April 25–28, 2011 tornado outbreak

Today is the anniversary date of one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks in recent times.  This also means that the highways in the great plains, also known as "tornado alley" will be jammed packed with storm chasers, both professional and amateurs, as they seek the opportunity to see one of these remarkable weather events.

We wrote about storm chasing a while back.  And a google search will find more on the subject.

Storm Chasing 101

Springtime brings out the weather fans and they converge on the American Midwest to catch a tornado.

Storm chasing is a growing pastime and was made popular after the movie Twister hit the big screens.  and continues to draw interest with a variety of TV shows on cable.

For a quick little introduction to Storm chasing, see:

Bristow, Robert S.; Cantillon, Heather. Tornado Chasing, Parks & Recreation. Sep2000, Vol. 35 Issue 9, p98. 8p.

Tornado Chasing .... for fun?

The Midwest has been getting hammered with severe weather over the past few weeks, and even the weather stars from the Weather Channel may be over their heads.

We wrote a paper on recreational storm chasing a while back that might be of interest.  http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/19699

Tours devoted to tornado storm chasing have become popular in recent years, especially with the emergence of many profit and non-profit storm chasing organizations. While most literature in risk recreation has been directed toward rock climbing or other high-risk outdoor recreation activities, tours devoted to storm chasing are quite unlike these traditional activities. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of these organizations from information collected in a mailed survey. Areas to be discussed are specific tour details for each company, basic demographics of tour attendees, and other areas of tour requirements.

My hope that the tourists don't get in the way of public safety!

Spring means Tornadoes

and then tourists chasing them. I call this "risk tourism" since getting caught in a F5 storm ain't fun. To get some (dated) information about the Storm Chasing industry, see this link.

BTW: Western Mass had a tornado last 1 June 2011 that folks are still cleaning up from. My colleague Dr. Karl Leiker gave a paper at the AAG meeting in NYC in February this year and you can see his abstract at this link.

Storm Chasing

I did a study with one of my students a while back that looked into Storm Chasing: The Ultimate Risk Recreation. It was published in Parks and Recreation (Sept 2000). You can find it at:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1145/is_9_35/ai_66035661/?tag=content;col1

Now, given the horrendous loss of life in the Midwest over the weekend, I offer this question. Should we, as tourists, exploit the damaging impacts of Tornadoes?

I am reminded of this every time I am on the road, and a fire truck or cop car or ambulance scream down the highway and drivers do not get out of the way. Come on folks, let these people do their job. someone's life may be at risk!