We’ve all seen the movies. Scientists gear up to chase tornadoes across the Oklahoma plains, competing with each other to get there first. But is the reality of storm chasing anything like the movies? In a new episode of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything podcast, we ask real life storm chaser, Cyrena Arnold, to untangle fact from fiction and break down what it’s really like to go speeding after tornadoes.
Ask Us Anything answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions—from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. So, yes, there’s a reason some birds talk like people and no, airplane toilets won’t suck you into the atmosphere. If you have a question for us, send us a note. Nothing is too silly or simple.
This episode is based on the Popular Science article “The real storm chasers of the Great Plains.”
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Full Episode Transcript
Sarah Durn: It’s a balmy Saturday afternoon in Kansas, and you’re driving along a wide open road. You glance in the rear view mirror and your heart skips a beat. Huge, black storm clouds are building in the sky behind you. Lightning flashes. Thunder rumbles. On the radio, an alert blares. A tornado has been spotted not far away.
As you drive as fast as you can away from the storm, a caravan of 10 SUVs whizzes by. What the heck are they doing? Why would anyone drive towards a tornado?
Little do you know, that caravan is packed with hardened storm chasers, just like Helen Hunt’s character in the 1996 classic film Twister. But is real storm chasing anything like the movies?
Welcome to Ask Us Anything from the editors of Popular Science, where we answer your questions about our weird world, from why do we need braces to how fast would New York City fall apart without people? No question is too simple or too out there. I’m Sarah Durn, an editor at PopSci.
Laura Baisas: And hello, I’m news editor Laura Baisis.
SD: Here at Popular Science, we can’t stop thinking about all the world’s strangest questions, and this week, we have a special interview episode of Ask Us Anything delving into all things storm chasing. Woo-hoo. What is it? Who does it? And is it anything like the movies? Laura, you actually interviewed real-life storm chaser and meteorologist Cyrena Arnold for this episode.
LB: I did. Cyrena is the absolute coolest.
SD: Ah, I wanna go storm chasing with her so bad.
LB: Kinda do and kinda don’t. Kind of a little afraid of it, but also if I’m gonna go storm chasing with anybody, I think a seasoned meteorologist is kind of the perfect person to go with.
SD: Yeah, I don’t know. I might get too scared, but the idea of it seems fun.
LB: The idea of it’s great. Sounds great on paper.
SD: Sounds great. And you also wrote a story for Popular Science all about storm chasers, so before we get into your interview with Cyrena, let’s lay a bit of groundwork here. Can you tell us what exactly is storm chasing?
LB: So it’s a term that’s evolved quite a bit over the years, but Hollywood tornado movies basically get a lot of it right.
In general, storm chasing means tracking a severe thunderstorm where a tornado is likely to form.
SD: So badass. So where do chasers typically go to track these storms?
LB: It varies, but tornadoes primarily happen here in the United States.
SD: Really, you don’t get tornadoes elsewhere?
LB: You do. While tornadoes happen in China, Canada, and even Australia, nowhere has tornadoes like the good old U.S. of A.
We have by far the most frequent tornadoes, as well as the most dangerous storms.
SD: I don’t know if that’s an award you want.
LB: No.
SD: And when and where do most of these tornadoes happen in the U.S.?
LB: So it can vary a bit. Peak tornado season for the Southern Plains, so that’s Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, is from May into early June.
On the Gulf Coast, it’s earlier in the spring, and in the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest—so think North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota—tornado season is more June and July.
SD: And what are chasers actually doing when they go out?
LB: So that’s cool. That all depends on the specific chaser. For a lot of hobby storm chasers, it’s all about getting that great picture or video of a tornado.
SD: Kinda like Glenn Powell’s character in Twisters?
LB: Exactly. So then you have storm chasers with more of a meteorology background. These chasers can collect really important data on these storms, so things like wind speed, direction, precipitation. All of this helps weather forecasters get on-the-ground data that even the most advanced radar might not see.
SD: Okay, so it’s a little more like Daisy Edgar-Jones’s character in Twisters, or Helen Hunt’s character in the original film.
LB: Exactly.
SD: And I imagine the fact that these real-life storm chasers can report things that radars can’t see is really important, right?
LB: Absolutely. Storm chasers in the field can radio back in to the National Weather Service about what they’re seeing, and from there, the Weather Service can issue potentially life-saving warnings.
SD: Wow, so storm chasers are actually saving lives.
LB: Absolutely, and that’s not something I necessarily even realized until I spoke with Cyrena and she talked about how important that is. Storm chasers are able to be the eyes and ears on the ground and help keep people safe.
SD: No pressure.
LB: Yeah, yeah. None whatsoever.
Now, before we get into my interview with real-life storm chaser Cyrena Arnold, we want to hear from you. What questions are rotating around in your brain? Submit your question by clicking the “Ask Us” link at popsci.com/ask. Again, that’s popsci.com/ask, and click the “Ask Us” link.
SD: We’ll be right back with Laura’s interview with a real storm chaser, after this quick break.
LB: And welcome back. Today, we have a very special guest interview. With us is Cyrena Arnold, a meteorologist, author, and host of the Storm Front Freaks podcast. She’s currently based in New Hampshire, where she is the director of product marketing at Atmospheric G2, and importantly, has 20 years of chasing storms.
Cyrena, thank you so much for joining.
Cyrena Arnold: Yeah, you’re welcome.
LB: So first, tell me, how did you get into storm chasing?
CA: Ah, that’s a very good question, and how I got into storm chasing was accidentally storm chasing. So I was born in the southern Caribbean where they don’t even get hurricanes, where the weather is really nice.
And when I was five, we moved to Denver, Colorado, or a suburb of Denver, and all of a sudden one day there was this thunderstorm, and I’d never seen a thunderstorm before, and then there’s hail, and I’d never seen hail before, and there was lightning, and I hadn’t seen that, and then a funnel cloud formed.
LB: Ah.
CA: And it formed a tornado, and the tornado just went across this big field, and I so vividly remember standing in the doorway of my house, looking out at that and going, “Wow.” That’s, that’s cool.
And a switch flipped in me when that happened. And so I just, I just loved weather, and I have really dedicated my entire life to it, you know, all of my education and every science fair project and everything like that.
So I knew I wanted to study severe weather. I knew I wanted to go to the University of Oklahoma, and when you’re out there at the meteorology school. It was wonderful. My first big storm chase was Cordell, Oklahoma, October 9th of 2001, where we saw seven tornadoes. One was a F3 tornado.
LB: Wow.
CA: And that’s the beginning.
LB: And one thing I think, like, me, myself, and anybody that watches some sort of a sci-fi or some sort of fictional take on a very real thing has to wonder: What do the actual scientists think about this portrayal? So can you tell me, what do you think about the Twister films specifically? Are they at all accurate?
CA: Yes and no.
LB: Right.
CA: There are some things about them that are super accurate.
LB: Mm-hmm.
CA: And there are some things about them that are not. I think the, for me, the funniest thing is how successful they are in storm chasing. They make it seem so easy.
LB: Right.
CA: You, you know, we’re out, oh, we’re gonna get in the car, and you drive 30 minutes, and there’s a tornado, and there’s another tornado, and, and no. No. No, no, no, no. The, the real story—
LB: Hmm…
CA: —is that you see a tornado on average about one out of every 10 of your storm chases.
SD: Wow.
CA: So you have a very low percentage rate. And then in order to do that, you’ve gotta forecast this right. You’ve gotta set yourself up in the right place. You’re possibly driving hundreds of miles, and you’re putting in a tremendous amount of time for a couple seconds.
Most tornadoes are very short-lived. They’re small, and there are some bigger ones, but you spend a lot of time and work to be successful, and I’ll go entire years and not see one. That’s probably one of the biggest things is that they just make it look so easy and, and so simple, and it’s not. Some other things that they get right or wrong, there’s always, like, a rivalry, right?
Yeah. Like in Twister, you know, it was Jo and, you know, Jonas and, and they fought. And, in the Twisters movie, same thing, right? You know, these competitive chase teams. This is a hobby that has some of the greatest camaraderie out there, and if you don’t believe me check out a gas station any time you see a whole bunch of storm chasers there.
They’re not fighting in the parking lot. They’re doing stuff together, looking at weather models together. They’re taking pictures together, laughing, joking, playing, like, football together. This is a like, a group thing. And I know when we’re out there with the Storm Front Freaks, we’ll see people that we’ve interviewed on our podcast and that we know and talk to, and you, like, run up to these people and give them hugs and high fives.
You know? You know these people, and we have this common bond.
LB: Yeah.
CA: So there is a lot more camaraderie in it, and very, very little competition.
LB: What about some things if it’s like your group, where you’re going out there and you’re, you’re not necessarily doing pictures and video, you’re doing more research and data.
How is that portrayed in the movies, that side of it?
CA: Yeah. It’s funny because in the movies it seems like everyone’s out there for research purposes. And that’s really cool, and in the 1980s and ’90s, that was absolutely true. Most of the people who went storm chasing were meteorologists. It was for scientific purposes, stuff like that.
Today because of those movies, they’ve made it a lot more popular where a vast majority of the storm chasers that are out there now have absolutely no meteorological credentials. And that’s totally cool. That’s fine as long as you go through a lot of training education, ’cause this is still an, this is an incredibly dangerous thing to be doing.
You can’t just walk out your front door and say, “I’m gonna go chase a tornado today,” or you’re gonna get yourself hurt. So most of the people who are out there are hobbyists. They do it for fun. They’ve taken a lot of chaser education courses and talked with other chasers, and a lot of those people who are doing it for fun or into photography.
They, maybe they want a picture of a tornado. Maybe they want really great storm structure. There are still researchers out there. There are still research projects. You have mobile radar on wheels teams out there with remote mesonet sites, so cars or stations you can move to have weather sensors on the ground, and they are collecting data, and we are still trying to understand how tornadoes form.
And that’s a part of it as well. And then you have the small sliver, fraction of a percent of, let’s just call them YouTuber using yahoos or stuff like that like wanna try to touch a tornado and bring you as close to it as possible, but that’s a real small sliver, so—
LB: Okay.
CA: —storm chasing is an incredibly wide spectrum of what’s out there, and, and I’d say a vast majority of them are out there to witness the beauty of nature and actually don’t have any degree or credentials or education in meteorology at all.
LB: And you mentioned the danger. How dangerous is it really?
CA: That can vary. If you wanna stay back from the storms, and you’re wanting to get storm structure, you wanna see the mammatus, and you wanna see the anvil. Maybe you’re far enough back you can see, like, an overshooting top. That’s, that’s pretty good.
LB: Yeah.
CA: You’ll find yourself okay there. But the hazards aren’t just the tornado. The hazards are downbursts. The hazards are lightning. The hazards are hail. The hazards are flooding, flash flooding. Water and flooding kills more people in weather than all of the different weather perils combined.
LB: Wow.
CA: So flooding is incredibly dangerous.
But if you have properly educated yourself, you understand the storm structure and where these different things are located and understand storm motion and dynamics and thermodynamics—
LB: Mm-hmm …
CA: —it can be done in a relatively safe way.
LB: Have you ever been caught up in a situation that you’ve thought, “Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten myself into this,” or, you know, any, um, dangerous storms?
CA: Absolutely. Absolutely. Uh, I got caught one time in a wet microburst of a storm structure that I didn’t understand, and I have never felt wind and rain like that in my life. I was stuck inside my truck. I couldn’t see anything. It was rocking like I was in a hurricane, and the bed liner in the back of my truck was bowing from how much wind was going through there.
I thought it was gonna pop out and go flying away. My ears popped from this wet microburst. It was crazy.
LB: Mm-hmm. Wow.
CA: I remember when this happened, I was like, “I’ve messed up. This is not a safe place.” I’ve been way too close to lightning. When you’re out storm chasing, that’s just inevitable as well.
So I got a car stuck in the mud one time because the mud out there is a special kind of mud that when it gets wet, that turns into the slickest stuff you’ve ever seen, and unless you have four-wheel drive, you’re not getting out of it. Learned that the hard way, and while running to safety, almost got hit by lightning.
I’ve chased tornadoes at night, ’cause I thought that would be fun, and then I realized I couldn’t see anything. So in, in my early days, in my college days, I’ve made a ton of mistakes, and I’m really lucky to say that I, you know, I learned from all of those experiences.
LB: Do you have… I, I know that this might be like asking, you know, what’s your fav- who’s your favorite kid, but do you have a favorite chase?
CA: Ooh. There was a storm in Clovis, New Mexico May of 2003 that was probably the angriest storm I’ve ever seen, and it was actually, it’s funny, we called her Tina because it was the day we chased her was either the day of or the day after Tina Turner passed away. And you know, and she was a, like, powerhouse, right?
And so this storm was just ferocious. And so we called her Tina, and so I’ll always remember Storm Tina. It had inflow winds blowing into the storm at, like, 67 miles an hour sustained. This thing was just sucking up air from the lower atmosphere and throwing it up high like I had never seen in a storm before.
The teals and the green colors you saw inside the storm from the hail that it was producing in the places that I didn’t wanna be were incredible. This storm was just, it was angry, and it was ferocious.
There’s also a storm, God, in the early 2000s. I was in, like, Okarche, Oklahoma, and this one, I, was hilarious ’cause we have our old-school video cameras. We’re filming it. We know we’re in the right area. We’re looking at the storm structure. The sirens in the town go off, which gives you goosebumps, and when you’re a storm chaser, is one of the coolest sounds in the world. If you’re living there, that’s terrifying. And we’re looking for it, looking for it, and we, you know, kind of, kind of finally see it at the end, but then we gotta drive away and get to safety.
We go back and watch our video that night, and with the resolution of the video camera, the contrast was better, and there was a funnel and a tornado in front of us the whole time, and we couldn’t see it because of—
LB: Whoa …
CA: —the way the light was and the brightness and the contrast. We were in, like, just this weirdest place.
LB: Just the whole time, it was there? Just—
CA: The whole time, yep.
LB: Hanging out.
CA: Just hanging out, had no idea, and so it was, yeah, and that one was, that, like, that’s just one that, uh, me and, and my friends from college, we just look back at and laugh. Like, to this day, we’re still like, “Oh, yep, you know? That Okarche day, man.”
LB: So when you’re actually out there, how is that whole team setup and dynamic different than it is in the movies?
CA: The movies are funny ’cause it’s almost like there’s the set day. Yeah. Where, where all of a sudden, hey, on the calendar, oh my God, it’s May 1st, tornado season is, is opening. You know, and that’s not how it is at all.
There are opportunities where chasers can get together. There’s storm chasing conferences. They usually happen in the off-season in, like, February, which is nice. But with a changing climate too, we have changing storm times, and we’re actually seeing Tornado Alley shift further east, and the seasons are longer.
We’re seeing it fall more into, uh, February, March in, in the southeastern parts of the U.S.. So people just start showing up, and you start chasing on their own. And once you really start getting into the severe season, yeah, you meet up, and you see other people when you’re out there, and in the gas station parking lots, people are there, and you see each other and can hang out for a bit while you’re staging and waiting for storm initiation or whatever.
But it’s not like they show in the movies where it’s like, “Oh my God, everyone mark your calendar for this day and we’re all gonna meet at this gas station in this small Oklahoma town.” It doesn’t work that way at all, and there’s days you can have a line of storms that form from Texas through the Dakotas, and so storm chasers just spread out all along across that line naturally, and it’s just a very natural sort of process. That’s not as scheduled and not as quick and easy as they make it look in the movies.
LB: There you go. Last question, but I love to ask scientists this one, whether it be from movie, TV, comic books, books, favorite fictional scientist?
CA: Miss Frizzle. Does she count?
LB: Oh, 100%. She, she definitely has a PhD, but is also teaching elementary school as a scientist, yes.
CA: You know she’s a teacher—
LB: Mm-hmm.
CA: But man, Miss Frizzle embodies everything about science, the curiosity, the willing to learn, making mistakes and trying again, and also, like, rocking outfits.
LB: Yes.
CA: Like, really cool science-y dresses and stuff while doing it, and making science fun, and I think that is awesome. I am so … I’m game. That’s great. Sign me up. She’s amazing.
LB: Cyrena, thank you so much for joining us. Now, if people wanna find you on the internet, where should they look?
CA: Everything for me is at wxcyrena, and Cyrena is spelled really unusually. Thank you, Mom and Dad. Love you so much. It’s C-Y-R-E-N-A, so W-X-C-Y-R-E-N-A on all the social media platforms.
My website, everything is at wxcyrena. And find me. Find me on social media. We’re gonna be talking about the storm chase while we’re out doing it, so check in and see what’s going on there. And we were just talking about Miss Frizzle. She’s one of my favorite people, and I am trying to be her, I think, more and more every day.
I’ve written three children’s books about weather, too, and so you can find those through the links in trying to find me. I have The Weather Story, The Hurricane Story, and The Tornado Story, which are factual books, real meteorology, but in a nice, lyrical, easy to understand way for kids, and it’s just so important to me that science communication and science education piece is a cornerstone of what I do, so go check those out, too, if you’re looking me up.
LB: Awesome. Well, thank you, and good luck chasing.
CA: Thank you. I hope you find some wonderful, what we, other people call terrible, weather.
SD: What an interview. Now I really wanna go storm chasing with her.
LB: I know. I’m more convinced now.
And that’s it for this episode, but don’t worry, we’ve got more episodes of Ask Us Anything live in our feed right now. Follow or subscribe to Ask Us Anything by Popular Science wherever you enjoy your podcasts.
And if you like our show, leave a rating and review.
SD: Our producer is Alan Haburchak. This week’s episode was based on an article written for Popular Science by Laura Baisis.
LB: Thank you, team. Thank you, meteorologists and storm chasers, and thanks everyone for listening.
SD: And one more time, if you want something you’ve always wondered about explained on a future episode, go to popsci.com/ask and click the “Ask Us” link.
Until next time, keep the questions coming, and listen to those storm warnings.
LB: Seriously, they’re very important.
And seriously, watch out for flying cows.
SD: Moo.
