'Weather is something that no one owns': Veteran storm chasers share lessons from the field

It can be brutal and often dangerous work that’s not for the faint of heart. Enter these women, who are showing what it takes to track some of the most severe weather on the planet.

Chimera Comstock had a choice to make.

The storm chasers who had stayed the night in Limon, Colorado, after chasing supercells in the area were beginning to thin out, traveling to the next target. There was a stout cap in Kansas that, if it could break, would spawn strong tornadoes.

"It was one of those parameter days where everything is maxed out. If you get something on the ground, it's going to be guaranteed to be a monster," Comstock told AccuWeather. She added that the setup in Kansas was a "high-risk-high-reward" scenario, and she feared the chance was too great that the cap wouldn't break.

Meanwhile, the storms from the previous day in Colorado had laid out perfect conditions for convection.

Comstock made the call to stay, even after one chaser in her caravan had left a note on her car, poking fun at her decision.

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And in the end, her forecast came through.

"I think we probably had about seven tornadoes off that supercell, and multiple times we had tornadoes that were on the ground at the same time," Comstock said. "And then the crown jewel of the day was we had a large dusty corkscrew tornado that was an anticyclonic tornado. And I think that's probably the single most photogenic tornado I've ever seen on top of it being the rarity of being an anticyclone tornado."

At a safe distance away, a second tornado had also touched down behind her crew, giving them the choice of tornadoes to chase. At least three tornadoes were associated with the storm on June 4, 2015, according to the National Weather Service.

"I'm really proud of my forecast that day," Comstock said.

Storm chasing has largely been male-dominated, but women like Comstock, a freelance journalist and storm chaser, are changing public perception of who can chase.

"Most people that are familiar with storm chasing through TV, they're not going to know any particular women storm chasers ... because it is so male-centric, and I would like to see that representation change," Comstock said. "In an even smaller group of storm chasers are people that are in the LGBT community, like myself."

Comstock came out as a trans woman while standing in the eye of Hurricane Laura in 2020, flying a transgender pride flag as she covered the storm. She had been trying to get ahead of rumors that had already begun to circulate about her transition in the storm-chasing community, though added that she would make the same choice over again, even when the public reaction to her transition took an "extreme" economic toll on her career.

Comstock as well as a few other trans storm chasers she knows have had to pull back from the public light as a result of coming out, adding another reason as to why the representation of trans meteorologists and storm chasers is difficult to find.

"It's difficult when I have to go out and chase by myself, and I'm in very rural parts of the country," Comstock said. "There's not a lot of safe options for restrooms. I'm out there by myself at night a lot of times on these nocturnal events, and it's made me rethink a lot of the ways that I approached storm chasing."

Raychel Sanner, the co-founder of Tornado Titans, told AccuWeather she is still grappling with what it means to storm chase as a transfeminine person.

"Experiencing the difference and what storm chasing is when you're not cismale was humbling," she said. "It's still something I'm grappling with -- all the implications of like what it means to be chasing by yourself in rural America, miles away from the nearest person on a dirt road where no one's around, but then a set of headlights appears, like that changes how that feels 100%."

Sanner, who uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, helped co-found Tornado Titans as a collection of photographers and filmmakers who chase storms across the Great Plains and use the footage to create educational materials on the weather.

Since its creation, Tornado Titans has been the first of many things, including the first group of storm chasers to create widespread educational content around weather and storm chasing and has developed the first storm-chasing web series, according to Sanner. The organization is in its 11th year, and during the next decade Sanner said they could see it expanding into more virtual reality initiatives and long-form storytelling.

While she is spearheading these initiatives now, she was more uncertain back in 2018 about if she would be able to keep Tornado Titans or if she would still be able to speak with people in a serious manner. Like Comstock, they faced an important decision that would shape their career.

"The biggest event of my life was coming out as trans and all the things that came with that," Sanner told AccuWeather. "I came out in 2018 after storm season, and going into the 2019 storm season, I honestly was wondering, 'Is storm chasing even for me? Can I do this?'"

They had already been storm chasing for 15 years at the time, but it wasn't a question of their skill so much as their place in the community and being out in the Heartland.

"I was really questioning, 'Is this something that is even for me? Am I allowed to roam the rural parts of America as a trans person in search of tornadoes?'" Sanner said. "I resolved that conflict in 2020."

After a delay due to the pandemic, Sanner counted 2021 as her "comeback tour," where she hit the road once more to chase storms.

Comstock and Sanner have both been chasing for nearly 20 years, and now more women are joining them out in the field either to report on the storms, to photograph them or even just to see a tornado in person rather than over the radar.

AccuWeather Lead Storm Warning Meteorologist Raya Maday, who began storm chasing in 2021, was initially driven to chase for the experience of seeing a tornado in the field rather than on the radar.

"I find it fascinating to see a thunderstorm develop in real-time when I spend most of my time forecasting them in operations," she said. "There's just something about experiencing all the different things of a thunderstorm versus just forecasting it. I get to feel the strength of the inflow, watch an updraft develop, and watch real-time as a funnel cloud descends and becomes a tornado."

Her first chase was May of 2021, when she, two of her friends and her soon-to-be fiancé drove around western Kansas. While they didn't see a tornado that time around, Maday said they still got to see the sun setting right underneath a supercell that was producing hail.

"That was quite a magical moment," she said.

Their next chase took them to eastern Colorado, where her forecast led her to the only tornado that would touchdown that day in the southeastern portion of the state. Well out of the way of residential areas, there were no structures nearby for it to destroy.

"In that moment, my fiance decided that was a great moment to propose, too," Maday said.

One of the first lessons learned while out in the field is that sometimes nothing too exciting will play out. Storm chasing involves plenty of time sitting around and waiting, potentially for something that will never form.

Other lessons are a bit more harrowing.

Comstock had been through several hurricanes throughout her career, but Hurricane Michael would be the one to remind her that even a prepared storm chaser can quickly find herself in danger.

She had tangled with strong hurricanes before, including Category 4 hurricanes Harvey and Ike and even Category 5 Hurricane Irma.

"When Michael happened, I went in kind of with a false sense of security, thinking that, 'Well, I'm prepared for this,'" Comstock said. "We had been in high-end Category fours, you know, this is something that we could probably handle if we just really play our cards right."

As the hurricane's projected landfall shifted, Comstock and her crew aimed for the center or the right quadrant, wanting to document the most extreme conditions of what the group thought would be somewhere between a Category 2 or 3 storm at the time of landfall.

"It kept rapidly intensifying, and it was really obvious just before landfall in our final positioning what we were about to encounter," Comstock said. "We just bit off a little more than we could chew."

Hurricane Michael made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane near Mexico Beach and Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida on Oct. 10, 2018, with 160-mph maximum sustained winds. It was a monster of a storm, and the first Category 5 to hit Florida since Hurricane Andrew made landfall in 1992.

The Honda Civic that Comstock and her team were in didn't stand a chance. By the time the eye of the storm moved over them, the vehicle had been destroyed. With no shelter, and the rest of the Category 5 hurricane to follow, they took the stillness in the eye as an opportunity to find a safer place.

The air was thick with humidity as the group began its search, and temperatures had reached at least 95 degrees Fahrenheit, she recounted. Even while the air was still, panic was rising.

"It felt like you were in a monster movie because we had very limited time in the calm of the storm to figure out where we were going to survive the second half," Comstock recalled.

With the clock ticking, they found the Tyndall Air Force Base, abandoned and destroyed by the first half of the storm. But still, she didn't have many options. Comstock likened the scene to an abandoned base in a zombie movie, the approaching eyewall the horde moving for them.

"We had about 15 minutes there of just about sheer panic where we had to grapple with the fact that the only way we were going to make it through this was to have to break into the air force base and take shelter in what structure were left standing," Comstock said. "And we did that."

Hurricane Michael claimed at least 16 lives and cost at least $27.5 billion in damages when adjusted by CPI, according to the NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. The hurricane damaged an estimated 60,000 homes, according to numbers from The Associated Press, and the strength of the winds damaged an estimated 19,000 acres of trees across Apalachicola National Forest. The trees around the airbase weren't spared either, decimating the 18,000 acres of forest around the base.

Comstock described the forest as going from "being very lush forest to maybe one or two toothpicks left standing, and otherwise, you could just see from as far as the horizon every tree was snapped in half, and then you get into town and it just looked like the apocalypse."

April 14, 2011, was a date that would shape how Sanner would chase tornadoes from that day forward.

Sanner and her crew had been in the southeastern Oklahoma town of Tushka as the storms rolled in, and the hills and trees crowding the horizon in the area made it difficult to see tornadoes from a distance. Until recently before this event, Sanner described themselves as a relatively conservative kind of chaser, preferring to stay back and watch storms play out. However, at this point in her career, she found herself inching closer to the storms.

So when they spotted a wedge tornado and anticipated it would go into town, that was exactly where they headed.

"Then there was a moment during that, watching that tornado roll into town, that I was like, 'We're north of this tornado's path,'" Sanner said. "This is not good."

And so began the "Escape from Tushka," as Sanner referred to the event. They cut and ran east, heading south through the tornado's path and skirting up along the outer edges of the tornado.

"We had tree branches flying past us, had trucks wobbling beside us, power lines arcing, blowing up, our windshield wipers flipping around. It was a very scary experience, and it was something that really informed chase strategy for the rest of my career."

The storm taught Sanner the "Stay Right Rule," or staying to the right of the tornado's path to stay safe from the very weather event that had first inspired her to go into storm chasing.

Both Sanner and Comstock grew up in areas where the weather had a large impact on their lives, drawing them into storm chasing. And while they have found themselves with track records of successful chases, Comstock added that better representation of women in both the office and the field would have helped inspire her and other women.

"We as a society need to focus on also being willing to not just get them in the field, but let them have a platform once they are in the field so that they too are included in this," she said.

Comstock and Sanner also stressed that they would be available as resources to other transgender meteorologists and storm chasers navigating their way in the field.

"You are not alone," Comstock said to trans storm chasers and meteorologists. She added that while transitioning had come with a cost, the best thing that had come out of it was that she had found her partner, and 2021 was their first year storm chasing together.

"You should know that you can still do this," Sanner said. "The weather is for everybody. Weather is something that no one owns, no one gets rights to. You can do it. My advice is that do what's comfortable, though."

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