Betty Rathbun can attest that when her son was about 6 or 7 years old, he didn’t watch the same television shows the other kids watched.
“He watched The Weather Channel instead of cartoons,” she said.
Now going into his senior year of college, 20-year-old Brett Rathbun has recently completed a three-week field course in storm chasing as part of his studies for a Bachelor’s degree in meteorology at SUNY-Oswego.
Rathbun, a 2007 graduate of Ilion High School, said he and the crew of 14 other students and four instructors took to driving across 13 states in the Central Plains to find some storm action as part of the field experience. Rathbun, who has never seen a tornado before, said he saw a total of four tornadoes and two land spouts.
The team worked with members of Vortex 2, a group of scientists equipped with high-tech radars and gear that chases storms throughout the country. Vortex 2 was featured in the Discovery Channel show “Storm Chasers.”
Rathbun said the day normally started with a forecast discussion with the Vortex 2 team. He said the meetings included, “where we might want to chase, what the pre-storm surroundings were and where weather balloons should launch.”
Weather balloons are “devices that give readings of the atmosphere to determine if it is favorable for storm weather,” he said. Rathbun had to deploy weather balloons as part of his time in the field.
Rathbun captured more than 450 photos of tornadoes, land spouts, hail, wall clouds, shelf clouds, lightning and rainbows from his field experience and 29 videos. He said on the slower days, the crew did some sightseeing and visited places like Mount Rushmore in South Dakota and Devil’s Tower in Wyoming.
“It seems like it’s something I enjoyed doing,” he said of the storm chasing. “I always liked knowing about tornadoes and hail. It was great to experience and to see a lot of this stuff for my own eyes.”
Rathbun said he hopes to one day work as a meteorologist at the National Weather Service.
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Web site, “peak tornado season in the southern states is March through May; in the northern states, it is late spring through early summer.” Tornadoes can occur at any time of the day, but most likely between 3 and 9 p.m. A twister tore through Wisconsin leaving 125 homes in ruins Tuesday after a warning siren failed to alarm.
Tornadoes can also be very deadly, with over 25 deaths confirmed already from tornadoes this year. Rathbun said the crew had Doppler radars and global positioning systems to help determine where they were in relation to a storm so they did not get too close to danger.
Rathbun’s mother said they were naturally worried.
“We were excited for him,” she said. “We knew it would be a good opportunity for him to see firsthand about what he was studying at school.”
She did mention they included a lot of prayers for him.
Ilion, N.Y. —
