The Process is the Goal Redux - Insights from Storm Chasing

(Author's note - this article was written for my company's internal newsletter and I am reprinting it here. While it shares a theme and a title with an earlier article of mine, the insights here are derived from a non-professional - and decidedly offbeat - pursuit).

On the fifth day of my 25th annual storm chasing trip to America’s Great Plains, I watched a thick, white, photogenic tornado churn its way across open prairie in Oklahoma. But the image that best captured the moment was not of the tornado. Instead, it’s the photo my son took of me, sitting at a restaurant table, with my head buried in my hands. You see, I was watching the Oklahoma tornado on a livestream, while sitting in a tavern in Dodge City, Kansas, because I had blown my target-area forecast.

My frustration had been mounting from the first day of the trip. After a weekend flight from Philadelphia to Kansas City, we had an opportunity to catch a storm that same evening – rarely achievable on a travel day. We traveled 10 hours, including a five-hour drive west along I-70, only to miss a tornado by 15 minutes. The next evening, we saw two different storms, both with tornado warnings issued – but no tornados. On day three, I chose not to chase because I didn’t like the weather scenario or the long drive. Of course, several significant tornados made the news, including one that was filmed twisting a wind turbine as easily as if it were bending a paperclip. The fourth evening featured another impressive and violent storm, with visible rotation and a tornado warning, but again no tornado. Still, it felt like a successful intercept – until we learned that another storm, 90 minutes away to the west, had a confirmed tornado on the ground. The sense of defeat culminated on day five, when I gambled on a lower probability forecast for tornadic storms in Kansas, only to find myself first under clear blue skies, then watching on an iPad as one of the largest and most photogenic tornados of late May touched down miles away.

The photo of me with my head in my hands captures the essence of storm chasing surprisingly well. Any pursuit dependent on the vagaries of the weather contains the seeds of exasperation. The US severe weather and tornado season peaks in May and June, but storm activity is never consistent during that entire time. Planning a storm chasing trip in advance is like throwing a dart at a dartboard. Severe weather forecasts often don’t pan out; even professional meteorologists get it wrong, predicting tornado outbreaks that underperform or don’t occur at all.

Official forecasts of tornado risk areas can cover tens of thousands of square miles, so a storm chaser must analyze the situation and determine a specific “target area” where a storm with tornado potential is most likely to form. Severe weather potential on a given day is not binary; the parameter space may fall anywhere along a continuum of probabilities. The setup may be too marginal to justify the drive, especially if it puts a better scenario the next day out of range. No matter how logical the decision to stand down, sometimes the atmosphere defies the odds and produces a miracle that day, resulting in endless self-recrimination for having let it go.

An accurate forecast and cooperative weather still leaves numerous decisions to wrestle with in the field: Patiently wait in the original target area, or dash off to the first radar-indicated storm even if it’s 60 miles away? Pursue which of several ongoing storms in the immediate area? Stay with a storm until the last shred of daylight (knowing that means the only dinner option is a Taco Bell drive-through at 11pm) or bail while there’s still enough time for a sit-down meal? Turn east now, or keep driving north, even though the next east road is five miles away? Is there an adequate escape route if needed?

Even with perfect execution, storm chasers remain at the mercy of numerous uncontrollable variables: sparse road networks; hills or trees that obstruct the view; tornados that can’t be seen because they are wrapped in rain; road construction detours; muddy and slick dirt roads; an ill-timed mile-long freight train crawling through a railroad crossing; or a caravan of other chasers slowing traffic to a crawl.

The window of opportunity each year is short. So many things must go right on each of the limited number of “chase days.” Disappointment when the atmosphere isn’t accommodating, and regret when chances are squandered due to forced and unforced errors, are bitter pills to swallow. A year is a long time to wait for redemption.?

There are of course days when everything aligns to provide a front row seat for a photogenic tornado moving across pancake-flat prairie. This is the popular perception of storm chasing as an adrenaline-fueled adventure. At times it certainly is, but the ratio of action to the boredom of driving and waiting is very low. In this regard, storm chasing is more analogous to fishing than it is to any sort of extreme sport. And chasers are not immune to second-guessing themselves even on successful days, when social media posts show that other chasers got closer to the tornado, or saw a more impressive tornado elsewhere.

Why would anyone willingly endure this seemingly masochistic pursuit?

Because the payoff is so worth it.

A storm chaser’s quarry is the supercell, a long-lived thunderstorm with a rotating updraft known as a mesocyclone. Supercells are responsible for the majority of severe weather, including strong winds, large hail, and potentially tornados.

A supercell can be twice as tall as Mount Everest. Think of it not as a “thing,” but as a dynamic atmospheric process, that would be invisible if not for the condensed water droplets that color it in with varying shades of gray. The rotation of the mesocyclone can be seen not just in the cloud base, where the first signs of a developing tornado appear, but also thousands of feet above. Jetstream winds blow from different directions at different altitudes; this wind shear sculpts the updraft like a potter fashioning a lump of clay into a bowl. The resulting shape varies, from a bell, to a corkscrew, to an upside-down wedding cake, or a UFO mothership. With or without a tornado, a supercell is awe-inspiring. A tornado is the cherry on the sundae, the holy grail, nature’s breathtaking juxtaposition of beauty and violence, of peace and chaos.

A cool breeze coming from an approaching thunderstorm is a familiar and pleasant experience. But being near a supercell is exhilarating. The wind is at your back, as you watch the mesocyclone sucking in air from miles around, visibly strengthening by the minute. Wind eerily whistles through power lines, cloud-to-ground lightning generates rumbles of thunder in the distance, and birds incongruously sing nearby, oblivious to the atmospheric chaos just a mile or two away. Moments of potential danger come when under the mesocyclone, inside what chasers call the “bear’s cage,” as curtains of rain encircle the immediate area, delineating the supercell’s broader rotation. Hailstones up to the size of baseballs threaten to crack the windshield. For safety, a chase is often called off when darkness falls. But the show is not over, as the storm moves off into the distance, still chugging along as if alive, flashing with near-continuous lightning, stars visible overhead while crickets chirp.

Occasionally, flawless analysis, forecasting, navigation and execution in the field align to be in the right place at the right time to witness the magical, ephemeral occurrence of a tornado. On this most recent trip, that moment arrived in Silverton, Texas, finally erasing the frustration of the previous days. When it all comes together, I know of no other experience that melds intellectual engagement and sensory immersion, with the occasional adrenaline rush, in the way that storm chasing does.

It took me years to accept that storm chasing has an inherently low success rate. Like baseball, batting .300 is pretty darn good. There will always be a chaser that did better on a particular day – but none of them are doing better every day. Most chasers are loathe to admit just how much luck is involved. Long ago, just as the frustration of a years-long personal tornado drought was making me rethink the allure of this pursuit, I realized the peak experiences were so fulfilling precisely because they were so rare. Disappointment and frustration were not only the price of success, but were fundamental to the process and amplified the triumphs.

The satisfaction that comes with success is inversely proportional to the rarity of the achievement, and the extent of challenges and setbacks along the way. (My team will recognize a concept here that I talk about often – “Challenging Fun.”) But I wouldn’t have lasted 25 years at this if I defined success only based on outcomes. Ultimately, one must love the process for its own sake: Analysis of observed and modeled weather data; building a three-dimensional mental picture of a volatile atmosphere; paying attention to visual cues without over-relying on data and technology; watching the situation unfold for better or worse; appreciating lesser atmospheric phenomena such as rainbows and sunsets; conducting a post-mortem to understand what happened and improve next time. The process is rewarding, even with – or perhaps because of – its disappointments and difficulties. In fact, if the science of meteorology ever advances to the point of predicting exactly when and where tornados will occur, storm chasing would no longer appeal to me.

More abstractly, storm chasing demands mindfulness and a tolerance for uncertainty. It fuses art and science. It manifests the curiosity-driven feedback loop of theoretical and experiential learning. Lessons and insights from storm chasing add unique perspective to my work as a CFO: pattern recognition; synthesizing information from disparate sources; balancing intuitive and analytical decision-making; overcoming cognitive biases; process orientation and systems thinking; probabilistic vs deterministic forecasting; managing and communicating uncertainty; visual representation of quantitative information; and approaches to communicating key messages to a general audience, as meteorologists do.

Outcomes are not unimportant. Storm chasing is, after all, undeniably fueled by obsession. Despite the many tornados I have seen, like the fictional Captain Ahab in Moby Dick I am still chasing my “white whale”: a photogenic EF5-strength tornado, in an open field, just a couple hundred yards away. But if that happens, I’ll still never stop chasing – because, ultimately, the process is the goal.

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