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Storm Chasers | |
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Genre | Documentary Reality Weather |
Created by | Sean Casey Joshua Wurman Reed Timmer Tim Samaras Tony Laubach Carl Young Matt Grzych Brandon Ivey Matt Hughes Chris Chittick Byron Turk Charlie Corwin Brian Nashel Ronan Nagle Jay Peterson |
Starring | Sean Casey Marcus S Gutierrez (TIV Driver Medic) Joshua Wurman Reed Timmer Tim Samaras Tony Laubach Carl Young Matt Grzych Brandon Ivey Matt Hughes Joel Taylor Chris Chittick Byron Turk |
Opening theme | "Blaze of Glory" by Bon Jovi (season 3–4) |
Composer | Didier Rachou |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language | English |
No. of seasons | 5 |
No. of episodes | 36 (list of episodes) |
Production | |
Executive producers | Charlie Corwin Brian Nashel Ronan Nagle Jay Peterson |
Production location | United States |
Running time | 45 minutes |
Production company | Original Media |
Original release | |
Network | Discovery Channel |
Release | October 17, 2007 – November 10, 2011 |
Related | |
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Storm Chasers is an American documentary reality television series that premiered on October 17, 2007, on the Discovery Channel. Produced by Original Media, the program follows several teams of storm chasers as they attempt to intercept tornadoes in Tornado Alley in the United States. The show was canceled at the end of its 5th season by Discovery Communications on January 21, 2012.
Storm Chasers was filmed each year in the central United States (an area known as Tornado Alley due to the frequency and severity of tornadoes occurring there) primarily during late spring and early summer, the time of the most frequent tornado activity (though some episodes of recent seasons have also been filmed in the lesser-known Dixie Alley in the southeastern U.S.). Several teams of storm chasers appear in the series. During the 2007 and 2008 seasons Dr. Joshua Wurman, a renowned atmospheric scientist and creator of the Doppler On Wheels (DOW), teamed with documentary IMAX filmmaker Sean Casey. Wurman's goal is to collect tornado data in order to improve warnings systems, while Casey's goal is to film footage inside a tornado using his armored Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV).
The TIV crew was led by Casey and Marcus Gutierrez, Driver and rescue Medic who took over Ronan's job as driver of the series, and Byron Turk, navigator and a shooter/producer for the show. The TIV was outfitted with weather instruments which collect data from approximately 12 feet above ground that, when combined with the DOW radar imagery and the probe data, can help to give Josh a more complete picture of a tornado's structure. Casey produced/directed his second IMAX feature about tornadoes. The first, Forces of Nature, was released in 2003 with a third of the film dedicated to tornadoes, the other two thirds were dedicated to volcanoes and earthquakes. Ronan is an executive producer on the film entitled, Tornado Alley, with the release on March 18, 2011. [1]
Beginning in 2008, the program also began following the team from the website TornadoVideos.Net (TVN) led by meteorology Ph.D. candidate Reed Timmer, Joel Taylor (Driver/Meteorologist) and Chris Chittick (Photographer/Probe Technician). The goal of Reed's small but highly mobile team is to capture "extreme video" as well as scientific data from tornadoes. Timmer's team is known as "Team Dominator" in the show, referring to the name of their own armored chase vehicle, the SRV Dominator. This new season also brought a change to Casey's team, replacing the TIV with the TIV2. The vehicle suffered constant chronic mechanical problems, and was sent for re-modification early in the season, and was replaced with the original TIV. TIV2 did not return from repairs until the middle of the third season.
During the 2009 season, the series also documented the TWISTEX team, led by engineer and veteran storm chaser Tim Samaras, who was killed in 2013 while storm-chasing in El Reno, Oklahoma along with his son Paul and fellow storm-chaser Carl Young. The main purpose of the TWISTEX team is to deploy their "turtle" probes into the path of tornadoes and deploy mesonet vehicles around the twister. Carl Young helps pilot the Probe vehicle while Tony Laubach drives one of the mesonet vehicles, M3. Another addition to Casey's team was the addition of the Doghouse, driven by meteorologists and storm chasers Matt Hughes (died 2010) and Brandon Ivey, who chased as part of the TIV team. The original Scout, PROBE, TWISTEX, and TVN vehicles all carry probes that are designed to be placed in the projected path of tornadoes to collect data and film footage from the lowest 100 feet of the tornado. [ citation needed ]
Before the beginning of the 2009 season, Josh Wurman become one of the leaders of Vortex 2, a government sponsored tornado research program, which led to massive cast changes. The DOW, Scout, Probe vehicles, along with all personnel except Casey, Turk and Neagle leaving the show's main cast. Vortex 2, Josh Wurman and some of the other cast reappeared in several episodes across Seasons 3 and 4.
The episode titled "Dedication" which debuted on November 3, 2010, begins and ends with a dedication to Wichita native Matt Hughes, who had attempted suicide on May 14, 2010 and died twelve days later at age thirty in Valley Center, Kansas. [2] [3] Matt was part of the TIV team, first in the Doghouse and then, in 2010, inside the TIV under Casey's direction. Casey's completed IMAX film Tornado Alley (opened in March 2011) is dedicated to Hughes. The 2010 season is dedicated to Yazoo City, Mississippi as TornadoVideos.Net chased the mile-wide tornado and were among the first people on the scene to help.
Season | Episodes | Season premiere | Season finale | |
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1 | 4 | October 17, 2007 | November 7, 2007 | |
2 | 8 | October 19, 2008 | December 7, 2008 | |
3 | 8 | October 18, 2009 | November 29, 2009 | |
4 | 8 | October 13, 2010 | December 1, 2010 | |
5 | 8 | September 25, 2011 | November 10, 2011 |
DOW and Scout were headed by Dr. Wurman in seasons one and two. Wurman and the DOW made only sporadic appearances in seasons three and four, as they had joined the VORTEX2 project, which is not generally followed by Storm Chasers cameras. In season four, Dr. Wurman was also shown to be involved in the funding of Casey's IMAX film, when he addressed Casey about a video showing reckless driving by TIV2. The Scout team of Danny Cheresnick and Aaron Ruppert appeared in the first two seasons as part of the DOW team, but were featured in only one episode in season three. [ citation needed ]
Chasing groups | Season 1 | Season 2 | Season 3 | Season 4 | Season 5 |
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Tornado Intercept Vehicle | Main | ||||
Doppler on Wheels | Main | Recurring | |||
TornadoVideos.Net | Cameo | Main | |||
TWISTEX | Main |
On January 21, 2012, Tim Samaras and Sean Casey confirmed on their Facebook pages that Storm Chasers was cancelled by Discovery Communications. [4] Tim Samaras was reportedly relieved when the show was cancelled as he thought it focused more on interpersonal drama than on the storms themselves. [5]
Repeats of the series are currently airing on the digital broadcast network Quest. Episodes of all 5 seasons are also available on YouTube and the first 4 seasons are available on Max.
Timmer and others continued a web series, Tornado Chasers , funded by Kickstarter campaigns.
On May 31, 2013, three members of the TWISTEX team, Tim Samaras, his twenty-four-year-old son Paul Samaras, and California native Carl Young (aged 45), lost their lives while chasing an EF3 tornado in El Reno, Oklahoma. [6] The three were featured in a Storm Chasers special, "Mile Wide Tornado: Oklahoma Disaster", aired on The Discovery Channel on June 5, 2013. [7] They were also featured in The Weather Channel's television special "Dangerous Day Ahead" which aired a month later.
On February 4, 2016, Herbert Stein (former driver of the Doppler on Wheels) died at age 57 after a short battle with pancreatic and liver cancer. [8]
On January 23, 2018, former Storm Chasers member Joel Taylor died of a drug overdose at age 38 on a cruise ship. [9]
Storm Chasers Sean Casey and Reed Timmer appeared on an episode of the MythBusters . They had the TIV 2 and the Dominator tested by MythBusters Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman to see if the vehicles could withstand wind speeds of 200 to 250 mph using a high powered jet engine. (See Storm Chasing Myths.)
Storm chasing is broadly defined as the deliberate pursuit of any severe weather phenomenon, regardless of motive, but most commonly for curiosity, adventure, scientific investigation, or for news or media coverage. A person who chases storms is known as a storm chaser or simply a chaser.
Michael Bettes is an American television meteorologist and storm chaser who works for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a co-host of AMHQ: America's Morning Headquarters. He hosts Weather Underground TV. Bettes has been an on-camera meteorologist for TWC since 2003, and is also an occasional fill-in weather anchor on The Today Show.
Timothy Patrick Marshall is an American structural and forensic engineer as well as meteorologist, concentrating on damage analysis, particularly that from wind and other weather phenomena. He is also a pioneering storm chaser and was editor of Storm Track magazine.
The Tornado Intercept Vehicle 1 and Tornado Intercept Vehicle 2 are vehicles used to film with an IMAX camera from very close to or within a tornado. They were designed by film director Sean Casey. Both TIVs have "intercepted" numerous tornadoes, including the June 12, 2005, Jayton, Texas tornado, the June 5, 2009, Goshen County, Wyoming tornado, and the strongest intercept, made by TIV 2, the May 27, 2013, Lebanon, Kansas tornado.
Doppler on Wheels is a fleet of X-band and C-band mobile and quickly-deployable truck-borne radars which are the core instrumentation of the Flexible Array of Radars and Mesonets affiliated with the University of Illinois and led by Joshua Wurman, with the funding partially provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF), as part of the "Community Instruments and Facilities," (CIF) program. The DOW fleet and its associated Mobile Mesonets and deployable weather stations have been used throughout the United States since 1995, as well as occasionally in Europe and Southern America. The Doppler on Wheels network has deployed itself through hazardous and challenging weather to gather data and information that may be missed by conventional stationary radar systems.
Tornado Glory is an American documentary film that was released in 2006 by PBS. Produced by Angry Sky Entertainment, the program follows storm chasers Reed Timmer and Joel Taylor through Tornado Alley during the 2003 storm season. The film was produced and directed by Ken Cole.
Joshua Michael Aaron Ryder Wurman is an American atmospheric scientist and inventor noted for tornado, tropical cyclone, and weather radar research, the invention of DOW and bistatic radar multiple-Doppler networks.
The Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment are field experiments that study tornadoes. VORTEX1 was the first time scientists completely researched the entire evolution of a tornado with an array of instrumentation, enabling a greater understanding of the processes involved with tornadogenesis. A violent tornado near Union City, Oklahoma was documented in its entirety by chasers of the Tornado Intercept Project (TIP) in 1973. Their visual observations led to advancement in understanding of tornado structure and life cycles.
Tony Laubach is an American storm chaser and meteorologist. He has participated in several field research projects and is one of the surviving members of TWISTEX. He has been contracted as a severe weather photojournalist for various major television networks, and has starred in several television shows, including Seasons 3 through 5 of Storm Chasers on the Discovery Channel.
TWISTEX was a tornado research experiment that was founded and led by Tim Samaras of Bennett, Colorado, US, that ended in the deaths of three researchers in the 2013 El Reno tornado. The experiment announced in 2015 that there were some plans for future operations, but no additional information has been announced since.
Forces of Nature is an 2004 American IMAX 3D documentary film about strong forces that shape the Earth's surface. It is produced by the National Geographic Society, and includes coverage of
Reed Timmer is an American meteorologist and storm chaser. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he took an interest in science, including weather, at a young age, before experiencing severe weather, including a hailstorm at age 13. After presenting weather forecasts at his high school, he began studying meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, completing his PhD in 2015.
Howard Bruce Bluestein is a research meteorologist known for his mesoscale meteorology, severe weather, and radar research. He is a major participant in the VORTEX projects. A native of the Boston area, Dr. Bluestein received his Ph.D. in 1976 from MIT. He has been a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma (OU) since 1976.
Sean Cameron Casey is an American IMAX filmmaker and storm chaser who appeared in the Discovery Channel reality television series Storm Chasers. Casey created an IMAX film called Tornado Alley about chasing tornadoes and had to build the Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV) and the Tornado Intercept Vehicle 2 (TIV2) to film inside a tornado. Tornado Alley was released worldwide on March 18, 2011. Casey has been named one of the 50 best minds of 2008 by Discover Magazine.
The SRV Dominator is the name given to a series of vehicles used for Reed Timmer, as featured on the Discovery Channel series Storm Chasers. In April 2013, Timmer, designer and operator of all three Dominator vehicles, joined KFOR-TV's 4WARN Storm Team, all three vehicles collectively referred to by the station as "Dominator 4".
A prolonged and widespread tornado outbreak sequence affected a large portion of the United States in late-May 2013 and early-June 2013. The outbreak was the result of a slow-moving but powerful storm system that produced several strong tornadoes across the Great Plains states, especially in Kansas and Oklahoma. Other strong tornadoes caused severe damage in Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, and Michigan. The outbreak extended as far east as Upstate New York. 27 fatalities were reported in total, with nine resulting from tornadoes.
Timothy Michael Samaras was an American engineer and storm chaser best known for his field research on tornadoes and time on the Discovery Channel show Storm Chasers. He died in the 2013 El Reno tornado.
During the early evening of Friday, May 31, 2013, an extremely large and powerful tornado occurred over rural areas of Central Oklahoma. This rain-wrapped, multiple-vortex tornado was the widest tornado ever recorded and was part of a larger weather system that produced dozens of tornadoes over the preceding days. The tornado initially touched down at 6:03 p.m. Central Daylight Time (2303 UTC) about 8.3 miles (13.4 km) west-southwest of El Reno, rapidly growing in size and becoming more violent as it tracked through central portions of Canadian County. Remaining over mostly open terrain, the tornado did not impact many structures; however, measurements from mobile weather radars revealed extreme winds up to 135.0 m/s within the vortex. These are among the highest observed wind speeds on Earth, just slightly lower than the wind speeds of the 1999 Bridge Creek–Moore tornado. As it crossed U.S. 81, it had grown to a record-breaking width of 2.6 miles (4.2 km), beating the previous width record set in 2004. Turning northeastward, the tornado soon weakened. Upon crossing Interstate 40, the tornado dissipated around 6:43 p.m. CDT (2343 UTC), after tracking for 16.2 miles (26.1 km), it avoided affecting the more densely populated areas near and within the Oklahoma City metropolitan area.
Tornado Chasers is an American documentary series that premiered on September 19, 2012, on TVNweather.com. The program follows Reed Timmer and his team of storm chasers as they attempt to intercept tornadoes in Tornado Alley in the United States and Canada. Season 2, funded largely through a successful Kickstarter campaign, commenced on September 30, 2013. The series is a two-time Webby Award Honoree, once for Best Documentary Series in 2013, and again for Best Editing in 2014.