To see a storm is to hear music. The whisper of puffy clouds as they merge and grow. The steady patter of rain. A loud inhale as the darkening mass pulls in the surrounding air. A groan as it begins to rotate. Sizzle of hot flashes and the first cloud-to-ground lightning bolt. Firecracker thunder ripping the sky. A quiet interlude of late afternoon colors — yellow and turquoise, forest green and dark purple.
The storm descends. It sounds of danger. Howls of 100-mile-an-hour wind. Thuds of fist-sized hail. Whine of a twisting, leering tornado cloud, sweeping the ground, dancing.
An hour ago, it was just clear, blue sky over densely packed fields of quiet Nebraska corn.
In 1989, fresh out of Florida State University with a master’s degree in meteorology, Paul Sirvatka began chasing storms. Back then, portable weather prediction units meant hourly satellite downloads over a primitive, boxy cellular phone. Sirvatka relied mostly on guts and instincts as he drove over forlorn roads through the middle of nowhere. Scientific data were hard to come by, he says, and the pursuit of storms was left mostly to the well-financed producers of “Nova” specials.
Like many of the pioneers, Sirvatka was in it for the excitement, the raw brushes with nature. But a decade of technological innovations can do wonders.
Right now, hovering at staggered altitudes over the continental United States, hundreds of hardy National Weather Service balloons gather information for a network of 20 storm prediction stations. The balloons can determine the temperature of the air, the amount of moisture in it, how much pressure it’s exerting, how fast it’s going and in what direction. The three-dimensional blanket of data can be accessed by anyone within reach of the Internet.
Sirvatka, 35, is a product of this particular evolution. And he’s good: Expert talking head alongside TV’s Tom Brokaw; appearances on CNBC and Fox; a $300,000 National Science Foundation grant; host of a national meteorological conference; a college professorship; a full-time assistant.
All this he explains while reclining on a couch in his cozy but fully equipped lab at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, where 10 years ago an administrator challenged him to develop a field study program for a fledgling department.
He came up with a three-credit course called Thunderstorm Laboratory, which culminates in hellbent drives around the Midwest in search of large and powerful storms, as in the kind that destroyed portions of Oklahoma City in May.
For Sirvatka, his friend and assistant Matt Powers, 27, and a rotating group of wide-eyed College of DuPage students who hand over the $500 fee, the course is a rite of spring.
The two trips each May and June form a spontaneous, traveling curriculum that reflects the storm chasing life at the peak of the storm season. Each adventure lasts 8 to 10 days, covers close to 5,000 miles and wanders through as many as 11 states.
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Starting in Illinois and heading as far south as the Texas Panhandle and as far west as New Mexico and the Rockies, Sirvatka leads two vans and about 15 students through a blur of gas station junk food and Dairy Queens, motels, inns and anywhere towns such as Hays, Kan., Kearney, Neb., and Weatherford, Texas.
Sirvatka figures he knows most of the roads by now. Freeways, highways, tollways, gravel, dirt, backwoods. Rain once mired the group two feet deep in a muddy Stockton, Kan., shortcut. The vans didn’t budge until a farmer came along with a set of chains, hours later. One of this year’s excursions passed by the exact spot. Already, the adventure is a legend.
There are other highlights, of course. Jess ‘n’ Jim’s Steakhouse in Kansas City, Mo., serves excellent beef. Dean’s Motel in Amarillo, Texas, features bullet holes in its doors. Two years ago, when a Jehovah’s Witnesses convention in Texas took up almost every vacancy in the state, Sirvatka had to drive his weary troops nearly to Oklahoma to find a room. All-day, 700-mile straight shots across state lines are not unusual. Three hours is a short jaunt.
The inside of a van can get downright nasty with such distances, packed to the sliding doors with equipment and bodies, anticipation and late spring heat. The group had to burn somebody’s socks once. He gave them up grudgingly, Sirvatka recalls.
When the chasers wake up each morning around 8 a.m., Sirvatka and Powers already are charting the day’s course. Working from laptop computers and with information from thousands of weather monitoring stations including the National Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., the two make quick sense of neat rows of numbers. They scan an intricate text of jet streams and moisture pools, thermal patterns and divergent flows, cold and warm fronts, highs, lows. They must narrow this global system down to the nearest three- or four-county area, where they figure nature’s best will be brewing that day.
“Data are the absolute lifeblood of this operation,” says Powers, a former student of Sirvatka’s who is now a graduate student at Northern Illinois University.
The plan is to start driving as soon as possible and close in on the target area. Sirvatka and Powers update their information by calling into storm chase central — the College of DuPage meteorology lab, which is staffed 24 hours a day. They can also wire into cyberspace from almost anywhere, including the vans or any community library.
As hours pass and the group gets closer, Sirvatka and Powers rely more on what they and others among the storm chasers can observe. Which way is the wind blowing? What are the clouds doing? They’re looking for the physical conditions that will reinforce their forecasts or dispel them. They move on hunches. They guess.
By now, they’re usually off the major arterials; the roads are trickier to navigate. Despite the pressure of time, they want to arrive at the safest position from which to view the storm. They must always know where they are and how to get out of there. Risks abound: floods, lightning, the tornado itself. A few miles southwest of the storm’s center is ideal, as the weather systems generally move north and east. The best time to view one is in the decreasing light of early evening.
Most times, they simply wait. They look for the point of the storm’s initiation. And even with accurate forecasts, storms often don’t form. The tornado is even more elusive, appearing in about 10 percent of thunderstorms.
“You try your hardest to get to a point,” Sirvatka says, “and then you hope for the best. The rest is luck.”
In the mornings, the students try tracking the storm. And this is education. Information is digested. Blank maps are quickly covered with all manners of curved and dotted lines, colors and arrows and predictions.
A finger lands. There.
That’s where the storm should hit.
A round of agreement.
They’re off.
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The first year of the class, the van drove too close to a storm in Wichita, Kan. A surge of lightning hit the vehicle, zapped the radio and flattened two tires. The storm grew as the group quickly replaced their wheels.
“This has potential,” Sirvatka remembers telling himself happily, even as he was being pelted by hail. “We just have to think of a better way to do it.”
He has done that, evolving from the typical philosophies of meteorology curricula: thick, heavy doses of calculus and applied physics. Sirvatka believes the trip is a more practical and beneficial experience for students, who traditionally don’t go chasing until after graduate school, if at all.
“My students are getting the opportunity to see and learn what they’re going to be studying,” Sirvatka says. “Once they see a storm, I know I can motivate them to learn the science. They have a real context for it. They see a storm and then we can discuss what happened and why.”
Roger Edwards, severe-storm forecaster at the National Storm Prediction Center, says too many students have only an academic conception of meteorology.
“Departments sledgehammer the theories to death but don’t corroborate that with what the atmosphere is really like,” he says. “The best meteorologists go out and look at the weather.” That’s why Sirvatka’s storm chasing class is “cutting-edge thinking in our science,” Edwards says.
At the College of DuPage, the only prerequisite for Thunderstorm Laboratory is Earth Science 115: Severe and Unusual Weather, a one-term course taught by Sirvatka in a loose, informal style twice a year. A cheerful man with a bright voice, Sirvatka says the freedom of his modest program simply reflects the love of weather he has had since he was a child growing up in Glen Ellyn. He remembers how he and his father would sit on lawn chairs and watch the storm clouds form and take over the sky.
“That was a really good time,” he says. “The most important thing was that he always let me get excited about it.”
Sirvatka’s students talk about their first storm experience with words such as “magical,” “humility” and “awe.” Rotating thunderstorm clouds, called supercells, can stretch across the horizon in a brilliant, overwhelming sensory display. Supercells, several miles in diameter, ascend up to 60,000 feet. A supercell takes on the shape of a giant anvil and moves in the manner of a barber pole. Sometimes, in a final stage, it descends, sucks in air, picks up debris, touches the earth.
“We turned a corner and there it was, lifting off the ground,” says Peggy Concannon, of Western Springs, recalling the May 1998 tornado that virtually wiped Spencer, S.D., off the map. “What I was thinking about was the people. I was seeing all these people devastated.”
“It felt like completion,” Chad Wojtiuk, of Darien, says of the two storms he witnessed during this year’s trip. “Everything we worked for, all those hours, it finally paid off. There’s the rush, but at the same time there’s such a sense of relief.”
“All night long, you can’t sleep,” Powers says enthusiastically of the numerous tornadoes he has seen in his seven years as Sirvatka’s assistant. “There it is, right in front of you. Here you are, right in front of it. You see it over and over again.”
Now a seasoned veteran, Sirvatka says the common denominator among watchers is the quiet that comes over them at the height of the storm’s activity. It’s an apprehension and heightened awareness that comes only in the presence of something so destructive and dangerous.
“This is the part of the creation that we should stand in awe of,” Sirvatka says. “Such great beauty and power. Power beyond human understanding.”
Every once in a while, the storm exhales all its fury, dissipates off to the east and leaves behind a reward: a fresh, cloudless sky, beaming with a bright, full moon over a field of golden Kansas wheat.
Sirvatka can’t help but smile.
