(Transcript) Never Stop Podcasting with Reed Timmer

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[00:00:00] Hey everyone, Gabriel here. At the end of this episode, there is an advertisement for a project that all of us here at Chaser Chat are super excited about. So if you want to listen, go right ahead. If not, that’s fine too, just turn it off. And either way, thank you very much for listening.

[00:00:14] Kay: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Chaser Chat Podcast. My name is Kay. I know everybody’s expecting to see Gabe, but it’s me instead. I am very excited to have Erin as my co host and the Reed Timmer on the phone today. So starting out with Reed, how’s it going?

[00:00:31] Reed: It’s going well. Yeah. I’m here at my mom’s place in upstate South Carolina. Just rode the Dominator bike today. Gizmo is doing good, so life is good.

[00:00:40] Kay: Great, we love it. I’m gonna get this out of the way and preface this, but this is actually a long time in coming here ’cause Gabe has messaged you on Twitter trying to get ahold of you, he told me, and I just happened to hit the stroke of luck that you saw my Twitter @ on the Chaser Chat page, so… pointing this out, we have been trying. We have been trying.

[00:00:59] Reed: I’ve never seen any, I haven’t seen any of those from Gabe.

[00:01:03] Kay: Yeah, he was like, you probably get a dozen DMs a day, so he was like, it probably got lost in the shuffle, but that’s okay. So we’re gonna get things going. I’d love it if you wouldn’t mind just telling the folks how you got into weather. I’m sure this is a story you’ve heard a million times, but I never get tired of hearing of it.

[00:01:18] Reed: I got into weather when I was about five years old, and I’ve just been obsessed with it for as long as I can remember, but also the sciences in general. So I started collecting insects at about the age of five, too, and collected insects for the next 10, 10 or 15 years until I graduated high school. I was definitely focused on the, on beetles and and silk and hawk moths for insect collecting, a little bit of the life sciences, too. I did Science Olympiad all the way through middle school and high school: the insect collecting, insect identification event, tree identification and bioprocesses, name that organism, a lot of the life sciences events. But meteorology, and severe storms, and storm chasing was always the deepest rooted passion of mine. And I think it started at age five when I was growing up in Michigan, and my dad was pulling us in a wagon to go look for minnows, and there was a tornado warning up there in Western Michigan. Reed The sirens were sounding, just mass chaos in town, and my dad was just barely walking, moving really slow, just relaxed. And the sirens were going crazy. My mom was yelling, get in here. Just like screaming at my dad, and the newspaper delivery guy just zipped by and he wasn’t even holding on to the handlebars just hauling, hauling ass to get back home, I think, when the tornado sirens were sounding. And I just remember the chaos of the moment, I think, and it just caused me to be obsessed with weather. I was scared of thunder and lightning when I was really little, but then just became obsessed with it growing up and watching the Weather Channel nonstop and shooting videos with the family video camera.

[00:02:52] I sent a bunch of letters to Tim Marshall and he actually wrote a letter back with a bunch of VHS tapes for storm chasing. Reed And then I sent some emails out to Penn State University, and was like, “Hey, how can I get a Doppler radar on top of my car?” And they responded with their coursework list and everything. When I got into high school and I got my driver’s license, I realized I didn’t have to wait for the storms to come to me anymore, and I started sneaking out of the house and chasing lake effect snow and tornadoes as well, even though I didn’t see any tornadoes until I got to Oklahoma in ’97. My first tornado was October 4th, ’98, when I was a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, my first semester there. And yep, that’s I’ve been storm chasing ever since. I’m 44 years old going almost 30 years of storm chasing and have seen almost 1000 tornadoes, maybe like 50 or 60 hurricanes. And yep, still chasing more now than ever before.

[00:03:49] Kay: That’s an awesome story. Full disclosure: I did just like the smidgest amount of research, but I wanted to hear that story from your own mouth rather than reading it on a news article that you did and that’s a great story. I think that a lot of people who are into weather now actually had that fear that you were mentioning earlier on in your story there. I know personally, I started out being afraid of weather and it was actually thanks to you on Storm Chasers that I thought it was cool instead.

[00:04:14] Erin: Yeah, same here.

[00:04:15] Kay: You got two fangirls here. Sorry.

[00:04:17] Reed: And now look, you’re dominating and storm chasing!

[00:04:21] Kay: The wide road that this path has taken me on is crazy. I just think it’s really interesting that we all have that fear, that start of fear in weather that kind of manifests into something bigger, and it’s really cool to be able to see that even, the biggest names in meteorology and the chasing atmosphere have that same kind of start. Where are you from in Michigan?

[00:04:41] Reed: I’m from Grand Rapids.

[00:04:43] Kay: Oh, my family’s from Lapeer.

[00:04:44] Reed: Oh, wow. Yeah, my good friend Jason is from Lapeer up there too. Yeah.

[00:04:50] Kay: Okait reallylly is a small world.

[00:04:52] Reed: I grew up on the west side of Michigan, but I haven’t been back there in a long time. I almost consider myself an Oklahoman now just because I moved there in ’98 and all my big life milestones happened in Oklahoma and I haven’t been back to Michigan too much, but I do miss the lake effect insanity. But I got to chase a lot of that over the years downwind of Buffalo or downwind of Lake Erie in Ontario. Some of those Buffalo lake effect emergencies.

[00:05:17] Kay: Didn’t you get to chase one of the lake effects recent- I want to say it was maybe last year, the one through that went through Buffalo or am I thinking of somebody else?

[00:05:23] Reed: Yeah, I chased that one on Christmas Eve or 2022. And also the same one that year in November. The real big one too was in 2014, the first lake effect snow emergency where they had eight or nine feet, and I chased that and a bunch leading up to that kind of in the early 2010s. But I took a break a little bit from chasing lake effect for a few years down in Oklahoma, just doing tornadoes. It was fun to, to chase it again. And I even saw a snownado one time! So I was covering a lake effect event in Lake Erie near Mayville and I’m driving along the through way, and I saw the updraft base of one of the convective bands, one of the lake effect bands, and then it started to form into a nub. And I was like, there is no way this is about to produce a tornado… Totally condensed went all the way down and you can see like an RFD come around the south side of it filled with snow wrapping around it and I think it actually made landfall too. So I was-

[00:06:18] Kay: Seriously?

[00:06:19] Reed: Yeah, I was up on the Chicago Bridge, and it went out of my field of view, but I’m pretty sure that it made landfall.

[00:06:27] Kay: I am so insanely infinitely jealous, because that would be so cool. Erin, do you have anything that you want to ask real quick?

[00:06:33] Erin: The tornadoes just follow him.

[00:06:35] Kay: I was gonna say, Reed’s just a tornado magnet.

[00:06:37] Erin: He really is.

[00:06:38] Kay: You drive around in circles enough and eventually you’ll see one.

[00:06:41] Kay: I keep telling myself that. I missed the water spout that you had posted that touched down just offshore in Washington is two hours from my house. Had I known that there was even the slightest chance I’d have been there, but it, I was like, all right thanks Washington.

[00:06:56] Reed: They get a lot of them in the Puget Sound there, don’t they, with the funneling that happens there?

[00:07:01] Kay: Surprisingly little, and if they do, they’re like actual strictly waterspouts. They’re not supercell oriented usually ’cause it’s just too cold here. We don’t get thunderstorms really. Actually, I was told at the job that I worked at, I used to be a tour guide, and we had gotten like four or five thunderstorms that year alone and my manager was like, this is the most thunderstorms that we have seen in this area in the last five years.

[00:07:24] Reed: Wow.

[00:07:25] Kay: Just this season. I was like, thunder came with me from Alabama when I moved here. It was great. You are probably most well known, I think, to many people right now for your work on Storm Chasers. We’ve already mentioned that’s how Erin and I came to know you and came to get into weather. I do want to hear a little bit about what it was like and what the challenges you faced as a chaser having a TV crew follow you, especially that early on in your career.

[00:07:46] Reed: Initially it took a little getting used to during the first season. But we got, we started getting along really well with the camera operator that was in our car. Chris Whiteneck was his name and he shot Deadliest Catch and all those extreme shows and when he came down, we connected with him right away. He crashed at our chaser pad there in Norman and we became really close friends with him and the second camera operator and all the producers and the whole production team. We just became one storm chasing team out there working together on a project. We got used to each other pretty quick, but it was difficult at first when you’re storm chasing because you have to explain every decision you’re making; if you’re taking a left turn at the stop sign, you have to say why you’re taking that left and it’s constant on-the-fly interviews. They’re like “tell me what you’re seeing right now”, and you have to give an answer on-the-fly while you’re storm chasing and trying to intercept tornadoes and drop ground based probes, and they’re a lot of times from New York or Los Angeles and haven’t seen a lot of severe weather. So they are definitely new to the whole thing, but they picked it up really fast and they became storm chasers themselves.

[00:08:49] Reed: I would say the camera operators started to learn the basics of storm structure and Chris Whiteneck being in the back of the Dominator for all those years through Storm Chasers and then our self shot series, Tornado Chasers, and also Storm Rising during the pandemic. He was my camera operator during that as well, and he has gone through some crazy stuff in the backseat of that car. Lots of tornado intercepts and window blowouts and pressure falls. The Dominator One was built by the mechanic at a golf course that I grew up working at, Kevin Barton, and so just to trust Kevin like that and trust us that we were going to drive him right inside of a tornado and survive, I think required a lot of blind trust on his end. But it was definitely challenging at first. I would say that the biggest challenge was even after the storm season, because it was nonstop travel and promo of the show. We were doing interviews all the time, and even your social life was getting out of control and Facebook was blowing up, and all of that was a little bit difficult for me to handle as well. You don’t really know it in the moment. It’s just next thing, like four or five years went by and you’re exhausted and burned out and then it have to recharge a little bit, but it was definitely fun.

[00:10:02] Reed: Most of it was a positive experience and there were definitely some negatives that come along with that, like just crazy things would happen in the years after with some people like spray painting things in our neighborhood and the HOA coming after me. I got audited by the IRS four years in a row and we launched a tour company and the workers comp commission sent me a bill for $ 300,000. You definitely do when you achieve a little bit of success like that in storm chasing, there’s always these other powers that will come at you and try to take it away, or it’ll almost be a little bit of a counterweight to what’s happening. So I definitely felt a lot of that happening, and a lot of it was from people out there that probably wanted to be on the show as well. It just definitely turned my life from being pretty relaxing, and in control of it, to just mass chaos for years to come. And it’s still pretty, pretty crazy now.

[00:10:56] Kay: Yeah. You turned into a rock star overnight, I would say. That’s got to come with a lot of difficulties as well, just personal life and, it’s got to be a little bit frustrating being in the middle of a chase and having somebody be like, hey, are you that Reed guy?

[00:11:08] Reed: Yeah, but that didn’t happen for a while. So it took a quite a few seasons for that and it doesn’t even happen that much now, you know in public. But, if we’re in the Dominator and in the Great Plains, you know and chasing and we stop at a gas station and every gas station stop is like a meet and greet now.

[00:11:25] Kay: That’s… yeah, that makes sense.

[00:11:26] Reed: Yeah, and believe it or not, I’m a little bit of an introvert, a lone wolf kind of person, too. So when I hang out with like big groups of people, it can be a little bit tiring sometimes, too. So I think that was probably the biggest challenge. But then starting in 2015 or 16, then I had probably seven or eight years where I was just storm chasing solo the whole time and kind of was able to get back that passion for storm chasing and connection with nature once again. But during Storm Chasers, I would say the biggest challenge was that our team just kept expanding, and by the last two years of Storm Chasers, we had two Dominators out there, two storm chasing tour vans, medic vans, we had news choppers that were flying over it and it just became this really long caravan of 10 vehicles and like 20 or 30 dudes out there. Every time you go to a gas station, everybody needs to get their own snack pack, go to the bathroom, and storm chasing became really challenging back then during Storm Chasers. But I was able to get my solo chasing back in the years after that, and now I think we can grow a team and a little bit more of a controlled manner these days.

[00:12:33] Kay: That’s something that actually, when I was talking to Gabe about this interview that he wanted to ask, was there ever a time, and it could be because of the fame and the stuff that came along with Storm Chasers negatively, or it could be just the amount of time on the road away from family, friends, or, some of the stuff that you see, unfortunately, as a storm chaser, was there ever a time where you felt like maybe it was time to take the hat off and do something else for a little while? Was there ever a time where Reed decided to stop chasing?

[00:13:01] Reed: No, never a time.

[00:13:02] Kay: I was gonna say, I’m sure the answer’s no, but…

[00:13:05] Reed: Yeah, no, that, yeah, that’s a hilarious question. Yeah, there was a time when I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to make a living doing it, though, around like 2006 or so. It was a slow season and I was having trouble like, paying people in the car at the same time. It’s easy to make a living storm chasing if you’re supporting yourself, but if you’re supporting like a group of 20 people or something, it can get a lot more sluggish. There was a brief time in 2006 when Joel and I were talking and he went into real estate right after our undergrad at OU in 2002. So we were going to start a tour company called Weather Tours, but then Joel read this book called “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and went into real estate just one, one day, I woke up the next morning and he was going full throttle into real estate and he started getting all these rental properties and basically ended up having 300 rentals, an apartment complex that he named after himself. There was like a statue of Joel in front of one of his apartments. He became really successful in real estate, and in 2006, Joel was going that path, and I was selling DVDs, and licensing footage to news media and social media- or social media wasn’t really around yet- until… I think it came, it’s Facebook came out in 2007, but was it 2007 when Facebook came out?

[00:14:25] Erin: Somewhere around there.

[00:14:26] Kay: Something along those lines. I was a late comer to social media.

[00:14:30] Reed: But my whole goal back then was to license video to news media and give it to them for cheap if they would put my website on the bottom of it when they aired it and that drove a bunch of people to TornadoVideos.Net and I was shipping out DVDs all the time and everything back when DVDs were a big thing and I was licensing to media. It was this year, 2024, where there were a ton of tornadoes from the High Plains, Great Plains, a lot of chasable ones, big outbreaks, including some in March, too. It was a really early start because El Nino is cranking in the Pacific and everything. When 2007 started, it really rocketed everything. Storm Chasers started then, too, I think in 2006 or maybe even before that. A large part of why I was able to make ends meet was because we were licensing our own footage to Storm Chasers before we were on it, and they would put Sean Casey’s voice over the video. But I actually did a lot better just licensing footage to the show than being on it so I probably should have just kept doing that for years. We got a call after the 2007 season from the executive producer of Storm Chasers. Her name is Lisa Block and she’s “Hey, do you guys want to be on the show?” And I said, sure. And she came down and shot a little sizzle reel of a Joel and I in front of the Dominator. And then the rest is history.

[00:15:45] Kay: The rest really is history. You debuted the Dominator series on that show as well. I remember the episodes quite clearly. What was the idea behind the Dominator? ‘Cause previously you were just standard chasing with probes, right?

[00:15:57] Reed: Yeah, and a lot of that was due to financial limitations. So for the most part, I chased in a beater vehicle. My first vehicle was a 1985 Plymouth Reliant, and then I had a double hand me down from my sister, a Mercury Topaz and the shocks on that. I would go over a bump and it would be like a teeter totter. But we would take that and catch air with it and everything and just drive pretty crazy with that vehicle. And then I had a Chevy Lumina that was held together by duct tape because I accidentally rear ended somebody, and instead of getting it fixed, I just wrapped a bunch of duct tape around the hood. We couldn’t even open the hood for 30,000 miles. So we ended up blowing the engine out of that vehicle. Going into Storm Chasers, I finally purchased a Chevy Tahoe that was the first vehicle that I’ve ever purchased from a bank and then I immediately turned that into Dominator 1 and I didn’t tell the bank or the insurance people that I did that to it. The Dominator concept actually came from a man named Steve Green and he was, he developed actually the first Tornado Intercept Vehicle and it was called Tornado Attack 1. And he hired Joel and I to guide him to the tornadoes. He was from a NASCAR background and didn’t know too much about storm chasing. So he offered to pay Joel and I quite a bit of money to guide him to chase a tornado. And in the end, he ended up screwing us out of the money. We ended up not getting it, of course, but the Malvin, Kansas tornado, we guided him to that. It was that bright white stove pipe, and he had this one piece suit on. He would stand on his car, with this huge crowd around him and he was going for the intercept of that tornado. But I think came a little bit short of that one. But that kind of gave us an idea. Joel and I are like, “why are we guiding these people to drive into one when they’re going to stop short anyway? When we could just build our own vehicle and start driving into them ourselves.” And then Sean Casey developed the TIV at the same time, and he happened to be on the show. So my goal with the vehicle and Discovery Channel did not want us to build the Dominators. They wanted us to be the underdog in a regular vehicle that saw more tornadoes than everybody else. And-

[00:17:59] Kay: They always have to have a story.

[00:18:00] Reed: -all for us. And that, that happened the first season, but I told him I’m going to build this thing anyway. But our goal was not really to be an actual interceptor. The goal was to have the Tahoe on the inside and have transparent armor, Lexan armor on the outside, so we can just get close to the tornado and deploy probes and shoot sensors into it, because I was really into the miniaturized sensors pretty early on. The only guy I knew that could build the Dominators was Kevin Barton up in Michigan. I grew up working at a golf course up there and Kevin was a mechanic at the golf course and he would build race cars on the dirt tracks up in Michigan. So we called Kevin and said, Hey, we got this crazy idea. We want to build a tank-like vehicle called the Dominator and we’d have to have transparent armor on it, and Kevin realized that if we were going to make it out of Lexan polycarbonate, that it would be way too heavy and it wasn’t very flexible. So we ended up replacing those areas outside of the windows with steel. I went up there to see it for the first time and I was like, Oh my God, this is a tornado interceptor. It looks like we’re going into tornadoes and Discovery Channel didn’t have the insurance in place or anything for us to intercept tornadoes. They had to ramp up their insurance for Sean’s team. So when they saw the Dominator, they were not very happy that we did it, but obviously they had to cover it because we were chasing in that and they ended up funding the Dominator. So I ended up forcing them to cover the Dominator, and I said, you’re not going to cover this unless you pay for it after the fact, and you have to get in these weird negotiations with TV people. If you don’t have an agent, because there are layers upon layers of suits and production companies and real business people above you in that, and that’s why the trickle down doesn’t quite make it to the people actually on those old reality TV shows unless you really exercise your leverage, and once you can air a couple seasons and the ratings start to go up and they realize that the ratings are because of you, then you can start to ask for things like a science budget and a way to develop the miniaturized sensors and to fund the Dominators and sponsorships and commercials and all that. So that’s how the Dominator developed. When we first got it the windshield was a little distorted. It had this big dent right in front of the car. It looked like we had a double windshield. So when we were driving, it always looked like we were driving downhill, even on a flat highway.

[00:20:14] Kay: Poor Joel with his depth perception trying to just gestures

[00:20:17] Reed: Yeah, poor Joel driving that and spots. It’s pretty dangerous. Right out of the gate, we intercepted a tornado near Kirksville, Missouri on May 13 in 2009, so that was our first intercept with the Dominator. The goal back then was to mount a small phased array radar on the roof of the Dominator that pointed in the straight up position so that we could measure updrafts and down drafts inside of the tornado, because the only way to measure those directly with a radar is to be inside the tornado, because you can only measure the wind that’s perpendicular to the antenna. So that was our goal was to use the Dominator to get inside of a tornado and then be the first to measure those updrafts and downdrafts inside of a tornado, and launch the probes, too.

[00:21:00] Kay: -probes, obviously you got to launch those. I like the way that you analogize that was basically it’s the probes from Dorothy in Twister. And that’s what you were trying to do. I appreciated that.

[00:21:10] Reed: Yeah. The 1997 Twister that came out when I was a senior in high school. So love the first Twister. I’ve seen it so many times.

[00:21:18] Kay: I’m a youngling… that was the year that I was born…

[00:21:21] Erin: I wasn’t even born yet.

[00:21:23] Reed: Oh my goodness.

[00:21:23] Kay: I am no longer the youngling.

[00:21:25] Erin: I was born in ’99.

[00:21:27] Reed: Wow. That’s a big tornado season. I talked to Jeff Piotrowski, Jeff Piotrowski said 1999 was even bigger than this year, 2024.

[00:21:36] Erin: Really?

[00:21:36] Reed: He said he saw a hundred tornadoes that year.

[00:21:39] Kay:I’ve been working on my Jarrell documentary script, and part of my introduction is just going over some stuff that happened weather wise in the 1990s. And… 90’s were not a happy time for weather.

[00:21:50] Reed: Yeah, that was a crazy time. And Jarrell was a mesoscale accident, too, during an active period in the 90’s, ’95. If I could chase any… I would probably chase the 70’s, but ‘ 77 was crazy; ’73, ’74 Dixie Alley.

[00:22:05] Kay: Since you brought it up, one of my favorite questions to ask my guests is, let’s say that you have all of the tech that you want from modern day and you could take it back to any historical event, what would you want to chase?

[00:22:14] Reed: I would chase the April 3rd and 4th Super Outbreak, I think. I like chasing those big outbreaks cause they last so long, and you have to factor in synoptics all the way down to the individual supercell storms and even the mezzo scale, wave after wave of storms that are caused by different mechanisms. So I think the original Super Outbreak would be one that I would love to chase. Some of those events in the mid 90’s would be awesome, too, in the Texas panhandle, but I don’t think we need any of the new technology to really chase those because a lot of them were stationary wedges. But I think that Super Outbreak, you’d really need the technology that we have. We had the technology that we have today though, during the second Super Outbreak in 2011 with mobile internet and cell phones and GPS and that, and it made it a lot easier to hop storm to storm and even to chase in Dixie Alley at all with any success, yeah.

[00:23:04] Kay: Was there any specific tornado in the 1974 Super Outbreak that you’d want to chase, or just any of them?

[00:23:10] Reed: Any of them. Obviously, the famous Xenia one is a big one. I’d love to chase the Palm Sunday Outbreak as well. That would be a fun one to do and chase the double wedge. But it really wasn’t a double wedge, it was just two suction vortices within one tornado cyclone. Definitely the original Super Outbreak. Yeah, but I don’t think I would have been on the Xenia, Ohio tornado. I probably would have ended up chasing the Southern mode, but maybe I would have taken advantage of that November 4, 2002 event and realized that the surface low is going to go nuts and possibly would have been up there.

[00:23:43] Kay: I always said that if I had chased that outbreak, I would want to chase the Guin, Alabama tornadoes from that outbreak, because it’s just really interesting how on top of each other they were and they were both the F5s. So they were as strong as you can get. You were in the middle of cleanup and then suddenly there’s a whole other monster coming after you. I find that interesting.

[00:24:01] Reed: Yeah, and that’s one of those rare cases where when you’re doing search and rescue, everyone’s ” I just looked at radar. There’s another one right behind it!”

[00:24:08] Kay: It’s… what do you do in that case? ‘Cause your shelter is destroyed.

[00:24:11] Reed: Yeah.

[00:24:12] Erin: It’s like straight out of a movie.

[00:24:14] Reed: Usually the one behind it is interfered with outflow by the lead storm, so it usually doesn’t materialize. But that one is the case where it did. I guess in Dixie Alley, when you have those really strong low level jets, they can recover pretty quick in the wake of them.

[00:24:27] Kay: Full disclosure, by the way, I do take notes during these interviews, and I have paragraphs worth of notes that I could ask you a bunch of stuff on here, but since you already brought it up, I do want to ask you about the 2011 outbreak. ‘Cause I actually used to live in Tanner, and that is an area that is still scarred from the Hackelberg Phil Campbell tornado. What was it like chasing that?

[00:24:47] Reed: We had chased for several days leading up to that and saw tornadoes almost every day. And by that time in 2011 we the Storm Chasers production window didn’t start until April 20th that year, and we had seen a bunch of tornadoes already before that in April. There was a really big outbreak April 14 in Oklahoma near Tushka, and I actually missed that when I botched that chase and it was pretty upset with that one that we ended up driving all night down to the Mississippi river, Louisiana, and we’re waiting there at eight in the morning for this obviously dominant supercell that was moving across Northern Louisiana, like 7-8am. It was the only storm that had any echo tops and it was looked a little bit different than the others. It was moving a little bit deviant. So we just waited for it for two hours at the Mississippi on April 15, 2011, and as soon as it hit the Mississippi river, like they often do, it became tornadic. I think it, the low level jets funneled up the Mississippi river delta there, and it touched down at 10:30 in the morning, right in downtown Clinton and all these power flashes and everything. Then we followed it off to the Alabama border, and then dropped south to an evening mode of supercells down near Leakesville, Mississippi, and we didn’t have any internet connection down there, but we knew a supercell was just to our east and we were in a national forest and came out right at sunset. It was almost dark, but you could still see the tornado. We came out of this grove of trees and there was this big cone, just like moving back and forth like a snake right over the road. So we knew that we were obviously close to it because it had so much side to side movement. It hit a transformer building. There was this big explosion like you see with those fake explosions on videos. It looked just like that, this like fireball. But that was the forgotten outbreak a few weeks before the Super Outbreak where there were like 150 tornadoes, and that one was just chaos. Even during the Super Outbreak a few weeks later, we were standing in damaged past from that outbreak, watching tornadoes crisscross the damaged paths from a few weeks prior. Then April 19, we were North of St. Louis and saw that crazy tornado near Bowling Green, Missouri, and actually had to cross the Mississippi River on a barge and then got another tornado in Illinois with a different storm as they’re crossing the warm front there. Then the period that kind of eventually led to the Super Outbreak began like around April 22nd. I think there was a big storm chase April 23rd and 24th. The 24th was a nocturnal event in Arkansas, and there were some wedges out near Hot Springs that we missed that day. We dropped to the east of Dallas and saw multiple vortex in Van Zandt County that was pretty crazy. I remember we were inside of that circulation, and I saw one of our camera operators just hiding in the bushes shooting that with all these vortices around his head just popped out of the bushes and he was shooting that event, but it was one of those multiple vortex tornadoes where there’s like a lot of calm survivable areas inside of the circulation.

[00:27:41] Kay: Nope.

[00:27:42] Reed: But the Super Outbreak was the biggest event of the whole series, because everything in the models was through the roof. The low level wind shear, the instability. We had never seen like 3-4,000 CAPE that far East. I guess we saw that a couple of weeks prior, but it was lower instability. The wind shear was like, 5-600 zero to one kilometer shear. Temperatures were rising into the seventies when we woke up. Really high dew points, too. Every single model we looked at, just all the parameters were maxed out and beyond the scale on Twister Data that we used back then. So we knew it was going to be huge and you could just stand outside and feel the power. You could feel the surface heating and you can look up and the winds were calm at the surface, but just above the treetops, you can see those wispy low clouds just ripping at speeds of greater than 70 miles an hour. So you can almost feel the wind shear instability combination. We probably should have played a little bit further north near that differential heating boundary that led to the Hackleberg tornado, Smithville, a lot of those big wedges. But we ended up chasing the first supercell that developed just to the east of Jackson, Mississippi. And on radar, it just had that perfect sickle shape. Even before it was producing lightning, you could tell it was going to be a very intense storm.

[00:28:55] Kay: It was going to be a powerhouse.

[00:28:57] Reed: Oh yeah. The thing looked crazy on radar right when it was forming as a shower and I was taking a ruler out and just lining up that storm and trying to find good terrain out ahead of it and we ended up near Philadelphia, Mississippi and we found an open view to the west and just let the storm come at us and it came over the trees and it was just Incredibly compact storm. One of the most compact, smooth looking mesocyclones I’ve ever seen. It went straight from mesocyclone down to EF5 wedge underneath it with a little bit of rain falling.

[00:29:29] Kay: Hey everyone, Kay here from Rough Skies Ahead and Chaser Chat. I wanted to give a quick shout out to the new Chaser Chat YouTube page, where you can find all your favorite episodes uploaded in video form with a transcription to follow along with. The link is in the podcast description.

[00:29:45] Gabriel: You’re probably wearing clothes right now, and I know you like listening to podcasts. Why not combine the two and support the show? Head over to chaserchat. com or click the link in the podcast description, and you’ll find all sorts of items like t shirts, hoodies, beanies, ball caps, coffee mugs, and more. And if none of that sounds good, at least buy a freaking sticker. It’s only three bucks. Visit the merch store today and support the podcast by going to chaserchat. com or clicking the link in the podcast description.

[00:30:16] Kay: When I did my research on the Philadelphia one for my Rough Skies Ahead episode, that was pretty much exactly what all of the research had said was first off that the Super Outbreak was one of the historically most conducive setups for severe weather, but also it went straight from Mesocyclone to EF5 Wedge and just hauling ass across the countryside. You guys were maybe like a mile away from it in that, in the Super Outbreak episode of Storm Chasers, right?

[00:30:38] Reed: It probably passed a quarter of a mile to the south of us, but it just was approaching and it looked like it was coming right at us. There were people on their porch back behind us. We were calling the weather service and you could hear the roar when it was way in the distance. It was, it started off like five miles in the distance and it was just coming right at us and did a little bit of a turn to the right and passed just to our south and had that rolling motion and everything to it because it was moving so fast. But it was a lot more compact than the other EF5s that day. It was a kind of a compact cone, large stovepipe. Some of those big EF5s that were further north, I think that they even moved into a more favorable environment because of that differential heating boundary. That outflow boundary that was left behind by the morning round of storms that caused that tornado near Huntsville at like 7am. So that left behind a little subtle differential heating boundary that I think lowered cloud bases a little bit and resulted in those mega wedge, Hackleberg and Smithville, Mississippi tornadoes. The Philadelphia one moved so rapidly to the east that we couldn’t keep up with it. So we went a little bit north, there were more storms developing to the west of us, and we saw this cumulus cloud develop, and before it was producing rain, it produced a big time tornado right underneath it. It was like in a matter of five minutes, it developed, boom, stove pipe underneath it, and then that storm suddenly dissipated, and another storm developed right in its outflow, and in another 10 minutes, that storm intensified and put down a tornado. So that was like a 15 minute period of storms developing bang tornado on the ground. Then that one ended up being the Tuscaloosa tornado. So we got on it near Scuba, Mississippi and tracked it all the way to Tuscaloosa, encountered some downed trees so we couldn’t chase it into Tuscaloosa. But then we dropped down to another storm that was headed towards Centerville, Alabama, and we were probably 40 miles to the northeast of that supercell and debris was just raining out of the sky. Minced up debris was just trickling down. The tornado was pumping the debris up and the jet stream was taking it northeast of the core and debris was falling down there, so.

[00:32:44] Kay: That’s nuts.

[00:32:45] Reed: We ended up intercepting that tornado. I say intercept, but back then that intercept was only a direct penetration of the tornado. We ended up being in the outer circulation of that one during the Super Outbreak. Joel was not a big fan of the tornado intercept. He knew better. He had a lot of common sense and realized that probably wasn’t sustainable for us just to drive right into the center of it.

[00:33:07] Kay: I can’t say I blame him. Not saying I wouldn’t drive into the middle of a tornado if I had an armored vehicle. By the way, kids don’t do that. Reed’s a professional.

[00:33:17] Erin: Yes. Don’t try it at home.

[00:33:19] Reed: So when Joel quit the team in 2009, which was fabricated a little bit, but he wanted to take a little bit of a break in 2009 and do more hanging out with his real estate friends back then. That’s why we were intercepting just driving right into those tornadoes in 2009 a lot of times with a cigarette hanging out of our mouth and just a crazy combination of events that happened in 2009.

[00:33:41] Erin: No Joel to stop you.

[00:33:43] Reed: Joel was such a great chaser. We saw a lot of tornadoes with Joel. And I was happy with the outer circulation intercepts. I didn’t need to get right in the middle. I’m terrified of intercepting tornadoes, too. So that’s why it’s so difficult.

[00:33:56] Kay: It’s really interesting that you say that, because, you’ve had however many intercepts at this point in time in the Dominator series under your belt, but it’s interesting to me that you will also freely admit that you’re nervous about doing that. Most people looking from the outside in probably are like, ah, he’s used to it by this point in time.

[00:34:11] Reed: Yeah, I’ve gotten a little bit less nervous the last couple years, to be honest, but you have to be in a certain mindset, I think, to just hammer the gas pedal and just drive at a tornado for sometimes several minutes. When you’re a quarter of a mile from the tornado, it looks like you’re like 50 yards from it, and you still have to drive another five minutes to get the intercept. It’s a difficult thing to do mentally, and I think that’s why this year when the Dominator broke down and we got a rental car or no matter what car I was in, it was still the same style of chasing. So sometimes it’s hard to walk it back.

[00:34:40] Kay: Rest in peace, Reed’s ability to rent cars anymore, by the way.

[00:34:45] Reed: Yeah, thank you. Yep, I can’t rent cars anymore. So… that’s because of this year, the Dominator kept breaking down and then my Subaru broke down, too. I blew the engine out south of Silverton and just kept having to get rental cars. I thought Avis was on my good side and they were one of the last companies that I still could rent from, but I ended up ruining that as well.

[00:35:04] Erin: That kind of sounds like you should start your own rental company. All storm damaged cars.?

[00:35:10] Kay: If it meant that I could go chasing without using my own vehicle, I’m down. I’ll rent from you, Reed.

[00:35:15] Erin: Take all the hail damaged sale cars-

[00:35:18] Kay: As long as you show me the pictures of the gorilla hail, I’ll give you the car for free.

[00:35:23] Reed: Oh yeah. “Beaters For Rent”.

[00:35:26] Kay: Yes!

[00:35:27] Reed: When I returned that one rental car on Avis, there the one, the Expedition that we used that was for Greenfield, Iowa and a couple of those big supercells down near Eldorado and we intercepted that one near Alvarado, Oklahoma, just drove right through it and a juniper tree came and hit the right side of the windshield and caved it in. Edgar had that little mist of glass shards hit him in the face. I think the modern windshield is designed so that the shards are circular in nature, so they don’t actually penetrate you or work their way to your brain if one gets in your eye. So I think that the shard is actually a little safer than it used to be at least but we did that with the Juniper Tree and the Eldorado tornado, and then I took it down to Levelland, Texas for that big hail core blew all the windows out.

[00:36:12] Erin: I remember that.

[00:36:13] Reed: Not on purpose. Not on purpose. I was thinking I was going to dodge all the hailstones, for the record.

[00:36:17] Kay: You don’t dodge hailstones. The hailstones come straight for you.

[00:36:21] Reed: The car was already totaled by that point, so I figured I would just let it rip.

[00:36:24] Erin: I distinctively remember when I was doing moderation for Team Dom, I said, Oh, I’ll be right back, and then I came back and I was like, where did… where’d the windows go? And I was like they’re… okay. It makes sense for Reed, but wow.

[00:36:44] Kay: I love how we’re like, it makes sense for Reed.

[00:36:47] Erin: Oh yeah, it totally does.

[00:36:49] Reed: Thank you so much for helping us with the moderation. I know it can-

[00:36:52] Erin: Oh yeah. I enjoy it so much.

[00:36:54] Reed: It was that hail core punch that did it. I returned the car and then they all started taking pictures of it, and there was one employee at Avis that was like, my son’s a huge fan. Can he come up? And I was like giving autographs and stuff there. It was really unusual. But they were all taking photos and posting it to Reddit and social media. They went viral, and I think that the suits at Avis saw that and sent me a bill for 42 grand.

[00:37:19] Erin: Wow. That’s insane.

[00:37:21] Kay: I feel like they’re missing out on a good business opportunity to be like, Hey, look, if Reed can chase in our vehicles… there’s gotta be something there that they could have been able to benefit off of.

[00:37:30] Reed: Yeah, I don’t think they want to encourage that type of behavior.

[00:37:33] Kay: Probably not. My first ever quote unquote chase was this year, and my dad very strictly told me that I was not allowed to chase in his car, and I did anyway, and he found out thanks to the podcast that I did with Gabe.

[00:37:43] Reed: Whoa. Sometimes you got to push the envelope like that. I did it with my mom as well here, so.

[00:37:50] Kay: It was this brand new car, too, like literally bought maybe a month ago.

[00:37:54] Reed: Did you put some dingers in it? Some hail dents?

[00:37:57] Kay: Thankfully not. There was no hail. There was an associated landspout 20 minutes from my location. I misjudged where I should have gone. I should have gone north instead of west, but yeah, it was just all rain. And I was like, all right, we’ll see… we’ll see if I know what I’m doing. I don’t. One thing that I did want to bring up as far as your scientific work, specifically with putting the radars on top of the Dominator series, I don’t think a whole lot of people really think about the kind of tech that is involved there and how risky it can be to have that kind of equipment on the top of a car going into a tornado. So tell me about some of the challenges there and how that ended up working out.

[00:38:31] Reed: It’s challenging, too, when you’re doing self funded research and you have to replace those radars or ground probes or technology. But the miniaturized sensors that we had back then would never work. So we would launch those into the tornado, amazing intercept with this air cannon, just… it would honk like a trombone, the air cannons would, they’d make this crazy sounding noise. Or like a, it was definitely a honk and it would go right up into the tornado. We’d never see it again. The only ones that we could find were the ones that were shot straight into the ground. So we had a lot that we would shoot into tornadoes that we weren’t able to recover, but the technology just wasn’t quite ready yet for the miniaturized sensor. With long range radio transmission and tracking of the probes. Maybe in the future we can use satellite internet. I know that Elon Musk is trying to do some kind of a mesh thing with satellites so that we can maybe track the probes using that where each one could be connected to satellite, ’cause right now we’re limited to cellular, and if you’re out of a data, if you’re in a data hole or if the probe falls into a ravine or canyon, then you’re not gonna be able to track it down. But then we met Chase and Spin, Mark Simpson, and he whipped up those sensors that worked perfectly in 2019 in two months, and then we had our first successful rocket launch south of Lawrence on the Linwood, Kansas EF4 tornado with a miniaturized sensor in there. We even recovered it and got all that data back and then published a paper. We were blocked from the AMS though. We went through a three year peer review period. We were trying to get it on the cover of BAMS. We had this one reviewer that was definitely a hater of mine. He’d write 30 pages of like personal attacks and for the reason of why it shouldn’t be published. We addressed everything, and then he started saying it was safety reasons why we couldn’t get it published. We’re using like a little toy rocket on the top of the Dominator or the tiny sensor that weighs less than a paperclip. And eventually they blocked it. The editor was like, I don’t want any of this controversy and they blocked it from the AMS. So you can launch a miniaturized sensor into a tornado, be the first to measure the pressure fall inside of the funnel, and the first to measure vertical winds, and then it’ll get blocked.

[00:40:39] Kay: Can anybody spell “ego” for me?

[00:40:41] Reed: I should share you the peer review. It’s crazy.

[00:40:45] Kay: If you’re cool with it, I actually am curious, honestly.

[00:40:48] Erin: Yeah, so am I.

[00:40:49] Reed: We re-submitted the EGU, the European counterpart of AMS, and they published it in two weeks. So the peer review process, which is open source, so that there’s a lot less of that funding business there, but yeah, so I guess we’ll publish it with the Europeans.

[00:41:05] Kay: Europeans get to publish the groundbreaking work.

[00:41:07] Erin: I know there’s like a lot of haters out there who are like, “oh Reed doesn’t have published” work or whatever. And like when you shared like your case study this year, I was like, look at this! Published work right here.

[00:41:21] Kay: It’s not for lack of trying.

[00:41:23] Reed: They tried to prevent that from getting published too, which yeah. And when it’s self funded too, and you don’t, you’re not getting funded by a government grant like that, that’s three years of a peer review process that we could have been launching more rockets and pumping out more papers and… but when you’re storm chasing so much too, you’re driving all the time. So I just don’t have time to write papers when you’re driving all the time. And I’m not very good at writing either, so.

[00:41:46] Erin: Oh, there’s people for that. You can hire them.

[00:41:49] Kay: Apparently you can just throw everything in ChatGPT now, and you can have it write it for you.

[00:41:53] Erin: Yeah.

[00:41:53] Kay: Please don’t do that. As a writer, I will cry.

[00:41:57] Reed: I will have our little grand theft auto shirt. But yeah, we took that off the store. The AI modification of images too, which has become “acceptable”. I think that’s just because they use those tools, but I think that modification of any image that’s a representation of real life is a slippery slope. One long time chaser that like Photoshopped that tornado into the thing in Clovis, New Mexico.

[00:42:22] Kay: Oh, I think-

[00:42:23] Erin: I recall that.

[00:42:23] Reed: His name starts with R. That’s totally someone that should you’d never would think would do that, ’cause they’ve seen so many tornadoes. That was the tipping point for me with modifying images, because how can you trust every photographer that they’re not modifying the storm if they’re removing power lines and… you can’t really trust that it’s an accurate representation of reality, I think, unless you indicate that the photo is modified, which whether you’re doing it by Photoshop or AI modification, but… videos eventually are going to be modified, too, at some point. I think if you’re representing a real person, too, that’s a slippery slope. I almost consider a storm, like a living, breathing organism as well.

[00:43:02] Kay: Which it should be. I have opinions on AI mostly just in regards to the regulation behind it because I’m also an artist and a lot of people just pump all of these images into AI image generations and it’s only a matter of time before people find my work and start doing it and no artist gets compensated for that. But, I digress. I will get on a soapbox if I don’t shut up now.

[00:43:21] Reed: I think it would be like, you know how board games have become popular again? I think people want to go back to the real human stuff. I know-

[00:43:29] Kay: That would be nice.

[00:43:30] Reed: -it takes off. I can see a pushback eventually.

[00:43:33] Erin: I definitely think that over the past two years, especially there’s been such a dive into the deep end of AI that people are like wow. Like they see all these deep fakes and stuff and I’ve seen people doing like these hugging videos of like made of pictures that like their deceased loved one, like hugging them one more time type of thing. And I think, like maybe like for me with my dad, like something personal for me, but it comes to a point where it gets weird. It’s, wow, it’s-

[00:44:10] Kay: It’s an episode of Black Mirror.

[00:44:11] Erin: Oh, yeah, most definitely. And I think you’re right with that, Reed, that we definitely went into the deep end and people like got scared. I’m worried about AI. It’s definitely something that is so unknown to us, and its capabilities are so out there that we don’t even know what else they could do.

[00:44:33] Kay: It’s a brand new technology, and that’s the problem. We don’t know the ramifications of a brand new technology yet. Which people say the same thing about cell phones. They’re like, people were so skeptical of cell phones. I’m like, I’m still skeptical of cell phones.

[00:44:44] Reed: I think the key is just to indicate that it’s AI or modified. I think that AI will be really good at recognizing if it’s AI.

[00:44:50] Kay: I would hope so. Yeah, I think that if you’re labeling it as such, it’s fine. But it’s when it is not labeled is the problem. Couple of final questions before we wrap up, specifically regarding some of the more notable chases in your career, because you’ve chased quite a few notable F5 and EF5 tornadoes in your 30 some year career that you said. I need to know about that because there’s got to be something intimidating about chasing the Finger of God.

[00:45:14] Reed: I think that with the Enhanced Fujita Scale underrepresenting tornado intensity that we probably chase a lot more Fingers of God than we realize.

[00:45:22] Kay: Yep.

[00:45:22] Reed: I bet I’ve seen like hundreds of EF5s, or F5s, to be honest, ’cause you can really tell when they’re cranking, they, when you get really close to them and they definitely are intimidating. The motion is just so rapid that you can’t possibly in your right mind intercept one of those types of tornadoes, like Greenfield, Iowa, for example.

[00:45:41] Kay: That’s the one that I was actually just thinking about was Greenfield is the first one that comes to my mind right now.

[00:45:45] Reed: You can just tell that those tornadoes that kind of have a special intensity to them, like Greenfield, Iowa. I would say, yeah, Greenfield, Iowa is probably one of the really unique ones from this year, I think, that was really stronger than the rest of them. Even all those outbreaks from April 26th, they were just ripping, like an EF5 does. That’s how you could tell that you were dealing with EF2 to EF3 type tornadoes, a couple EF4s, but Greenfield definitely had that rotation that I’ve seen with tornadoes that I think are EF5 and like May 3rd ’99, which I think was even stronger and more organized and more crisp and really sharp edges and everything’s really smooth with the structure. So you can definitely tell those storms that are producing the really powerful tornadoes.

[00:46:29] Kay: Yeah, definitely. I need to know some of your favorite chases that nobody has ever heard about.

[00:46:34] Reed: Reed Most of my- some of my really favorite chases that people probably haven’t heard about are the flash flood chases in the desert southwest, like chasing the front walls of the flash flood and being in the middle of the wilderness in Utah, just waiting for it for hours; this big wall of debris and logs and boulders will come rushing down. So those are a lot of my favorite chases are some of those flash flood chases. And probably a QLCS tornado that I saw down in Meridian, Mississippi was a pretty crazy one too, just cause it was my first real QLCS tornado that I saw. I had like a clear slot. It was a shared gust front and went through Meridian causing a bunch of EF3 damage there. But… trying to think of something that maybe nobody’s heard about. I love all every, almost every chase. A lot of the chases where if just the process is good, even if we don’t see tornadoes, if we’re just hook slicing, and in the right position all the time. I love those a lot, too. I would say probably the Robert Lee tornado this year that pure HP Supercell and digging that tornado out from the rain are some of my favorites. When you can’t see ’em until you’re in the perfect spot and you kinda have to keep your vehicle pointed into the wind and you have to do a lot to see the tornado and then to survive it. Definitely last year, one of those HP supercells near Hobbs, New Mexico, where I had to go all the way around the backside of the tornado and just saw this little bird fart touch down. Big HP supercell. But I ended up missing the Fort Stockton tornado down there, so. I’d say some of those HP storms where it’s more of a bird fart tornado are some of my favorites.

[00:48:04] Kay: Yeah, we like those. Your mantra is “Never Stop Chasing”. I would love to hear any advice that you have for aspiring storm chasers, meteorologists that are looking to get into the field professionally, what advice do you have for them?

[00:48:16] Reed: You need to do your second chase coming up!

[00:48:19] Kay: I do. Actually, it is a plan. I am very busy right now planning the last six weeks of my wedding, so I’m busy.

[00:48:26] Reed: Oh my goodness.

[00:48:26] Kay: Yeah. Next year, the goal, hopefully, is to get some chases in with Cassie and Carly.

[00:48:33] Reed: What about you, Erin?

[00:48:34] Erin: Oh, I barely chased this year. There was just nothing happening by me in Illinois, and I was busy with school and busy with working over the summer. I honestly think that my best year of chasing was like 2020 and like 2022. I just haven’t gotten out and I’ve just been really burnt out, lately, and just… the act of just going out there alone, especially just in the rural areas scares me sometimes.

[00:49:06] Reed: Yeah.

[00:49:07] Erin: But I think with the experience that I’ve been getting through the field of meteorology, I’ve grown a certain comfort with the fact that I have the knowledge of everything that’s going on. I just need to put that into play when I’m driving down the road, and it does help to have somebody with you, for sure. My boyfriend doesn’t want to go chase any nocturnal tornadoes with me anymore. That’s a story for another time. But It would definitely help to have a sidekick to look at the radar-

[00:49:41] Kay: At least your boyfriend will chase with you. My Fiance refuses.

[00:49:44] Erin: Yeah, it’s definitely something that’s not for the weak. I’m not saying he’s weak, but it’s something like if you’re not used to the adrenaline with all of that, it’s easy for you to be like, whoa, like he’s are they driving a twister?

[00:50:02] Kay: He’s cool with seeing the tornadoes, he just doesn’t want to drive, ’cause it’s, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 + hours on the road and he’s no thank you. God invented planes.

[00:50:10] Reed: You guys could spend all that time together!

[00:50:12] Kay: That’s what I said. But he was like, no, I’m gonna make sure that you have friends in the weather community so you can go chase and I can stay in the comfort of my home and play video games. I’m like, you know what fair.

[00:50:21] Reed: Sometimes chasing with a significant other isn’t always the best idea either.

[00:50:27] Erin: Yeah. We can all speak from experience with that.

[00:50:31] Reed: Yeah.

[00:50:31] Kay: My first chase was solo and I liked it, but I need to be able to either drive or focus on the radar and navigate. There’s no way. I had to do that all on my own.

[00:50:40] Erin: It gets really dangerous if you’re trying to look at both, because you can’t pay attention to one for too long, and… ugh, it gets messy.

[00:50:48] Kay: And this is why I’m chasing with people who know what they’re doing next year.

[00:50:52] Reed: Yeah, Erin, if you ever want to come with Team Dominator, you’re welcome.

[00:50:57] Erin: Oh yeah, that’s on my bucket list. It always has been.

[00:51:01] Reed: Yeah, Local Man Weather and Edgar next year, too. You guys have seen Local Man Weather, right?

[00:51:07] Kay: I have not, no.

[00:51:10] Reed: What a character. He has a cologne collection that’s 200 years old.

[00:51:13] Erin: Oh my god, he looks like he would have a cologne collection. Just like his suit and everything just he does.

[00:51:21] Reed: He has like a special different type of cologne that he’ll wear for different occasions and different moods that he’s in.

[00:51:27] Erin: He needs to come up with a storm chasing cologne. But one that like, smells good, not “I haven’t showered in three days, gas station food.”

[00:51:36] Kay: One to offset the storm chaser funk that comes with hours and days on the road.

[00:51:41] Erin: I do have one question, especially since it’s coming to the end of 2024, besides the mantra of “Never Stop Chasing” for your new year’s resolution, what do you think your new year’s resolution is for the year of 2025?

[00:51:58] Reed: Drink more water. So I’m trying to drink. Hydrate, I drink a ton of water already. Some of my all natural medicine, sleep aid that I take, and sometimes I take it during the day too, but that can dehydrate you a little bit. Oh yeah. So the, the, my sleep aid and it’s, cannabis medicine. So sometimes I could dehydrate a bit. I drink coffee in the morning, and so I want to try to drink 150 ounces of water a day. Just trying to keep things simple. Just drink more water. I want to start doing more of the activities that I really use to connect with nature, too: trail running and ride my bike and maybe get into fly fishing and stuff too.

[00:52:34] Erin: Oh, wow. Definitely get back to your normal routine or what you used to love so much. It definitely keeps you grounded, especially in very high adrenaline situations. .

[00:52:47] Reed: And when you’re trying to intercept a tornado, sometimes it can be a lot, but sometimes it’s just nice to go out there and chase and look for snakes in the morning, and then, oh yeah, chase, and then go to Applebee’s afterward.

[00:52:58] Kay: I’m so down with going herping with Reed Timmer, if I get out into Oklahoma or the Plains this year, just saying.

[00:53:05] Reed: Awesome.

[00:53:06] Kay: I’m a naturalist, so I can actually identify them.

[00:53:09] Erin: Oh, awesome.

[00:53:10] Reed: Yeah, we love the Herps.

[00:53:12] Kay: All right, everybody, I want to thank you again, Reed, for joining us on this episode of Chaser Chat. We’ll have to have you on again sometime in the very near future. Any final thoughts for us at all?

[00:53:22] Reed: Yeah, on the naturalist side of things, when I was up there fly fishing in North Carolina, the guy has actually seen like six Hellbenders.

[00:53:30] Kay: Really?

[00:53:31] Reed: Giant aquatic salamanders. When I was growing up, every family vacation we took, all I wanted to do was catch a Hellbender and I’ve never seen one. But this guy had him crawling over his feet and everything like a three foot long aquatic salamander.

[00:53:46] Kay: My favorite thing that I got to teach people about when they came to the zoo that I worked at was that the newts in Washington are actually poisonous. Like they have the same poison on their skin as pufferfish have in their spines. And that’s my lesson of don’t pick things up, kids, unless you know what you’re talking about, because you can hurt yourself real bad.

[00:54:07] Reed: A newt, believe it or not.

[00:54:09] Kay: A newt, believe it or not. But, fun fact, following that up garter snakes are the said newt’s only natural predator. They’re immune to that toxin.

[00:54:18] Howdy folks, Gabriel here, and I want to share something very special with all of you that I’ve been working on recently. For the last few months, I’ve been working with Carly Anna from the Carly Anna WX YouTube channel, and Trey Greenwood from the Convective Chronicles YouTube channel to create a new membership site called Storm Chaser Coaching.

[00:54:40] And for the next seven days, We will be offering all of our audiences the opportunity to become founding members. More details on that in just a moment. Storm Chaser Coaching is a project focused on helping everyone become a better storm chaser. Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or someone who’s never even chased a storm before, there will be something for you.

[00:55:04] Trey Greenwood and other expert storm chasers and meteorologists will create monthly training modules that dive deep into a wide range of topics related to every aspect of storm chasing. How to forecast specific types of setups, navigational strategies, selling your content, etc. If it’s related to storm chasing, we plan on covering it.

[00:55:28] There will be two membership tiers that you can join, Fast Track and Deep Dive. The Fast Track will be geared towards recreational storm chasers. If you’ve never chased a storm before or you’re not interested in learning how to interpret weather data, the Fast Track content will equip you with actionable information and implementable strategy, if you will, that you need to stay safe and enjoy storm chasing as a hobby.

[00:55:54] But if you’re more of a hardcore chaser, who likes to make their own forecast and take more risks, then the Deep Dive content will be your weapon of choice. Storm Chaser Coaching launches in the spring of 2025, and like I mentioned earlier, we’re giving all of our audiences the opportunity to become founding members for the next seven days.

[00:56:15] The link to join is in the show notes for this episode, and you’ll instantly be granted access to an exclusive community with myself, Carly, Trey, and the other founding members. We will all be in there answering your questions, taking feedback, and giving you updates on the product as we get closer to launch.

[00:56:34] You’ll also receive a lifetime 50% off discount on the cost of a Storm Chaser Coaching membership, which is an absolutely incredible deal that could end up saving you hundreds if not thousands of dollars in the long run. Myself, Carly, and Trey are all super excited to bring this project to the community, so make sure you click the link in the show notes and become a founding member today.

[00:56:57] And remember, you don’t want to wait! This offer expires at midnight on Wednesday, January 8th. Take care, everyone!