Interview with Storm Chaser Paxton
We spoke with Paxton, an avid storm chaser and weather enthusiast, to discuss his interest in weather systems and his storm chasing experiences throughout the years.
Interview completed on May 26
- When did you first become interested in weather monitoring?
In 2008 I was at a birthday for my cousin, we were having dinner and a tornado warning went off on my phone. I was looking out the window, and there was a big cone tornado in the distance. I ended up looking into it later and I believe it was rated at F-0 on the old scale. (We use the current scale of E-F.)
As a kid I had seen all of the programs on the Discovery Channel. I started looking at storms differently, going to school and going for a walk. I wasn’t doing storm chasing yet but if I looked out the window and saw a storm, I would get excited.
- How did you start storm chasing?
It was 2020, it was a not-so-great year, I was bored and I wanted to try something new with my Dad and get out, drive around and do stuff. So I said, “How about we go around and see what storms are happening?”. I was using the Weather Network app at the time. I would use the app to look at precipitation, would look at the map around the province and what was happening around Ontario. This was a very rudimentary way of chasing. I didn’t start chasing with friends until 2023.
I went storm chasing with my friend from Guelph, we went up to areas near Barrie and saw some storms. The downside of 2023 was that it was very hard to see storms. It was very smoky from wildfires. Barrie’s elevation is a bit closer to the cloud level so you get more smoke there. We decided against our better judgment, to race each other by running down the road before the storms started, only for us to end up coughing for the next hour!
In 2024 I went to the United States with my Mom, to storm chase in the south. My first chase day was May 6, 2024 and it was the highest risk they can issue in the US. That scared me a lot but we pushed on. I had started in Wichita, Kansas and drove west to Greensburg to get gas but also to set up there as a good vantage point to look at the storms as they started. I did end up meeting a couple of storm chasers from Canada, from the prairies and from Ottawa, and that was really fun to be chatting about it in the parking lot of the hotel. We left to go on our own, to get gas, and then the tornado sirens went off and scared everyone. Those sirens were actually a tornado test.
I had just gotten someone’s phone number that I just met, and said to them, ‘Did you hear that!?’. I was surprised because I hadn’t heard that before because we don’t have tornado sirens in Canada, except for Western University which has one. As far as I know they are the only ones that have one, and they usually set it off when there is a tornado warning.
Going back to 2022, there was another experience where I had applied to an internship just before graduating high school to storm chase and collect hail with the Northern Hail Project out of Alberta and that was a great experience for me. I had fun but I also did some interesting work.
For me that really helped convince me that I was really interested in storm chasing, rather than just ‘let’s go see a storm’, it was also about logging data. I understood that Alberta just had a lot of big hail and Ontario doesn’t usually get big hail.
- What types of weather have you monitored lately and what storms have you chased recently?
I chased some storms on May 9, 17 and May 19, this past year. On May 9, I saw a squall line, like a line of storms which were coming off of Lake Huron and there was a brief tornado that came out of it in Granton near Lucan, outside of London. My friend and I ended up driving south and missing the tornado in the northern portion. We ended up finding out that part of the storm we left strengthened and dropped a tornado, after the chase. We got a lot of nice photos and we drove through strong winds. I took some photos of trees down and found some small hail. It was the first chase with my friend since last year.
May 16 was up in Brussels, I had noticed on computer forecast models (what I use nowadays and not the Weather Network app for forecasting) that it had been trending that there was going to be a storm somewhere between Stratford and Listowel. So I convinced my Mom to head out there on the way up to the Caledon region because I was going to stay at her place for a couple of days. This was going to be a storm chase on the way up. When a storm ended up popping up, we drove to it and basically just parked on a side road and waited for it to do something. It started dropping a lot, a lot of lighting. I was surprised because I didn’t think that it would have lightning. It was over Brussels and we were near Listowel, and so I used radar and on the specific radar app I use, I can see how tall the storms are and it said 41,000 feet which is pretty high so I was like, ‘Wow, this is a pretty good storm, so we’ll chase this!’ The storm ended up having a really nice structured look. Usually in the summer, a thunderstorm pops up and dies fairly quickly, there is no structure to it. For this though the rain was super strong and coming down a ton, and there were lower hanging clouds in front of it which at the time I thought maybe a wall cloud, which usually happens after rotation.
On May 19, a few days later, I was hoping to see a tornado. The environment was looking pretty good for severe thunderstorms northwest as well as west of London.
I proceeded to drive west towards Milverton and I told my Mom if the environment still looks good up here, we won’t drive near London instead. Unfortunately the environment did look good in the Milverton area and I stuck around. Even though I had looked at London on radar and was thinking, ‘Yah this might do something’, I decided to stay up north because the environment looked better. I should have trusted my gut, because I ended up missing the main tornado event. I did see lightning and small hail in the area I was in.
This past week [on June 11], a friend and I went to Indiana Wednesday night. We stayed in Elkhart for the overnight into the early morning and then headed out to Illinois for our storm chase. Once we got to Illinois, we went to a Love’s Gas Station, which is loved by quite a lot of storm chasers in the U.S. So we got gas there and also met up with a couple of other storm chasers. One of the storm chasers I had met prior, but my friend had not so it was quite a fun experience before the storm chasing itself.
We were south of Davenport, Iowa along the border of Illinois while still being on the Illinois side. As we went to intercept the storm coming out of southern Iowa, there were tornado warnings. When we got further south we were positioned in a way where the storm was coming right at us so we had to figure out a way around it so that the hail wasn’t hitting us and so that we could also get into a position where we could see the tornado safely. Our only route at that point was to drive further south and then east and then south again to get south of the storm as it traveled east. We cut it a bit close but we were able to get into the right position but the storm ended up not dropping a tornado at that point. While we were headed east again on the road parallel to the storm that was previously tornado warned, a storm to our south started to get stronger and started to rotate as it moved north towards our road that we were driving on. I mentioned to my friend that it was still rotating quite a bit and he eventually pulled over on a smaller road where we parked and watched in for the next 20 minutes and those 20 minutes were the best 20 minutes of the month so far for us because it went from a rotating cloud to a full blown rope tornado. The tornado I saw ended up getting rated EF0 which is the lowest on the scale although it is a damage-based scale.
- How do you ensure safety and preparedness when storm chasing?
Usually I like to plan out ahead of time which roads can take me east or south or away from the storm but in a safe manner. A lot of the storms with tornadoes in particular can make sudden turns before radar updates. If those sudden turns happen you need to be able to maneuver in a safe manner around it or away from it.
You also want to usually keep 2 people in a car. If we wanted to chase with more, for instance if there are 5 people, it might be more confusing when making a decision. It would typically be easier in the moment to make a decision with 2 people. One person focuses on driving, the other is focused on navigation.
The easiest way to practice storm chasing before a bigger, more severe day is to chase regular thunderstorms that just pop up for the summer. They usually have bolts of lightning which you don’t want your car struck with, and hail which you also don’t want your car struck with. It can help you realize how close you can be to the storm without being too much in danger. That’s how I learned it personally.
Thanks Paxton for sharing your interest in weather and storm chasing experiences with us!
Paxton continues to monitor the weather and chase storms throughout Ontario, Canada and the U.S. He documents the storms he sees with high-quality photographs (seen in this blog). Paxton uses the handle Alluring Storms for his photography and weather monitoring. He currently volunteers with Instant Weather.
