Storm Chaser: A Photographer's Journey
from Abrams Books
The weather used to be reported after the news; today, it often is the news. Tracking news-making weather, storm chasers seek dramatic images of tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, lightning storms, and other extreme and unusual weather phenomena. News organizations compete to broadcast and publish these images because people care passionately about the weather.
Jim Reed is one of America’s most successful and award-winning storm chasers in an era when global climate is changing. His fifteen years of photography documents this change. As the years go by, he sees spring come earlier, summers get hotter, and tornadoes and hurricanes increase in frequency and intensity. In Storm Chaser, a beautiful picture book about some of the most powerful—and sometimes deadly—phenomena in our world, Reed shares his best images and his experiences as he tracks these storms throughout the country.
Adventures in Tornado Alley: The Storm Chasers
by Mike Hollingshead
from Thames & Hudson
From surreal skyscapes to wholesale destruction: the most dramatic scenes from the natural world.
The destructive power of nature has always been a source of fear and fascination, and never more so than now, when climate change and extreme weather conditions are constantly in the news. Across the central United States, the infamous storms of Tornado Alley are fueled by the collision of cold fronts from Canada and warm fronts from the Gulf of Mexico. People have been chasing these storms for decades in pursuit of thrilling experiences, but now a new generation of storm chasers is combining scientific knowledge with powerful images.
This book follows Mike Hollingshead and Eric Nguyen on seventeen chases through Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, illustrating the unfolding events with sequential shots and a running commentary by the chasers themselves. These spectacular storm portfolios are expanded with special features on weather phenomena like hail and mammatus clouds plus insights into forecasting and research. 340 color illustrations.
Storm Warning: The Story of a Killer Tornado
by Nancy Mathis
from Touchstone
May 3, 1999, is a day that Oklahomans will never forget. By the time the sun set over a ravaged plain, some 71 tornadoes had claimed around 11,000 homes and businesses and caused $1 billion in damage. One of them was a mile-wide monster of incredible power, the fiercest F5 twister to hit a metropolitan area, and whose 300 mph winds were the fastest ever recorded.
Veteran journalist Nancy Mathis draws on many interviews to weave the story of those few terrifying hours that irrevocably changed the lives of many Oklahomans. Storm Warning features Kara Wiese, who fought to save her son from the fatal winds; and Charlie Cusack, who followed the tornado's progress on television until it came knocking on his front door. Amazingly, only thirty-eight people perished at the hands of the Oklahoma F5. Many lives were saved by the efforts of professionals such as Ted Fujita, the creator of the Fujita Scale and dubbed "Mr. Tornado" for his relentless pursuit to unravel a twister's mysteries; the oft-criticized but dogged government meteorologists; and Gary England, a resourceful TV weatherman whose tireless efforts prepared hundreds of people in the tornado's path. Storm Warning alternates between personal stories and the history of the struggle to understand this bewildering force of Mother Nature, creating a nail-biting, captivating look at surviving the fury from the skies.
Tornado Alley: Monster Storms of the Great Plains
by Howard B. Bluestein
from Oxford University Press, USA
Tornadoes are the most violent, magnificent, and utterly unpredictable storms on earth, reaching estimated wind speeds of 300 mph and leaving swaths of destruction in their wake. In Tornado Alley, Howard Bluestein draws on two decades of experience chasing and photographing tornadoes across the Plains to present a fascinating historical account of the study of tornadoes and the great thunderstorms that spawn them.
A century ago, tornado warnings were so unreliable that they usually went unreported. Today, despite cutting-edge Doppler radar technology and computer simulation, these storms remain remarkably difficult to study. Leading scientists still conduct much of their research from the inside of a speeding truck, and often contend with jammed cameras, flash floods, and windshields smashed by hailstones and flying debris. Using over a hundred diagrams, models, and his own spectacular color photographs, Bluestein documents the exhilaration of hair-raising encounters with as many as nine tornadoes in one day, as well as the crushing disappointment of failed expeditions and ruined equipment. Most of all, he recreates the sense of beauty, mystery, and power felt by the scientists who risk their lives to study violent storms.
For scientists, amateur weather enthusiasts, or anyone who's ever been intrigued or terrified by a darkening sky, Tornado Alley provides not only a history of tornado research but a vivid look into the origin and effects of nature's most dramatic phenomena.
F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the 20th Century
by Mark Levine
from Miramax
It was April 3, 1974. Crime was soaring. Unemployment and inflation were out of control. A costly war had just come to its demoralizing end, and an unpopular President was on his way out of office. Then, over a sixteen-hour period, nature stepped forward with its own display of mayhem: an unprecedented outbreak of 148 tornadoes, covering thirteen states in the heart of the country, from Michigan to Mississippi. Hundreds of people were killed, thousands of homes demolished, and a billion dollars in losses sustained. Sixty-four of the tornadoes would be classified as severely violent; six belonged to the most rare, most deadly category: F5, or "incredible tornadoes."
Like the best nonfiction, F5 is a brilliantly crafted page-turner that reads with the immediacy of a novel, telling a harrowing story of natural disaster against the backdrop of the turbulent 1970s. Acclaimed journalist Mark Levine follows the heart-wrenching fate of a rich cast of intertwined characters -- ordinary Americans whose lives are transformed in a terrifying instant. A pair of teenage lovers are caught while driving on a dark country road; a Vietnam veteran is trapped at home with a newborn baby; a sheriff finds himself in the line of fire twice in rapid succession; a black preacher with a past of dire hardship struggles to protect his family.
Other figures enter the story from the broader cultural scene, including Hank Aaron, on his way to challenging baseballÂ’s home run record amid racist death threats; Patty Hearst, whose image as kidnapping victim is undergoing a radical shift; Richard Nixon and George Wallace, both intent on using the storms to their political advantage; and a memorably eccentric scientist, known as Mr. Tornado, who regards the "Superoutbreak" as the apotheosis of his scholarly life. Gripping and revelatory, F5 braids the story of the shattering outbreak with images of social upheaval and individual heroism in a stunning, unforgettable read.
The Tornado: Nature's Ultimate Windstorm
by Thomas P. Grazulis
from University of Oklahoma Press
The most far-ranging and complete book ever written on tornados. Provides information on the most destructive tornados in every state. (also in 200 other countries)
Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America
by Mark Svenvold
from Henry Holt and Co.
Why do some people chase the kind of storms that would send most people running for their lives? Why is it that devastating weather-and tornadoes in particular-maintain a primal hold on our collective imagination? How to account for the spectacular success of a company like the Weather Channel-not just a show, but an entire cable network with 86 million regular viewers, hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, and one abiding subject, the passing clouds?
With his guide Matt Biddle, an Ahab-like veteran storm chaser, Mark Svenvold draws a portrait of a culture enamored by extremes during a 6,000-mile journey through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. Along the way, the author encounters an assortment of characters out of a Fellini film: A duo named The Twister Sisters, from St. Cloud, Minnesota; a crowd-pleasing trio from CUPP (California University of Pennsylvania-at Pittsburgh); a team of chaser-scientists who have partnered with an IMAX film-maker from Los Angeles with an armor-plated truck; and a stock car racer from North Carolina whose goal is to drive through a tornado.
At the heart of the excitement are the awe-inspiring events themselves-a tornado that levels a small Nebraska town and the look back at the central Oklahoma tornado outbreak that included the single-most destructive tornado in US history. Similar weather disasters occur each spring in a kind of reverse lottery that has spawned a subculture of catastrophilia. Want to know what a tornado actually sounds like as it blows over or through your house? Big Weather answers this while also tracing the ways the sublime, in the classic sense, still has a profound claim upon our imagination.
Big Weather is a wryly observed meditation upon the weather as block-buster event that explores, with an ironic touch, our paradoxical relationship to the biggest story of our age-global warming-and the fate of the earth.
Tornado Watch Number 211 (Tornado Watch)
Earthshock: Hurricanes, Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Tornadoes, and Other Forces of Nature, Revised Edition
by A. G. Robinson
from W. W. Norton & Company
What causes an earthquake? When will another big shock shake Tokyo or Los Angeles? Can people create deserts? How are the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect interlinked? Is global warming a force of nature—or of man? This compelling and informative book, illustrated with marvelous photographs and specially commissioned artwork, explains the latest scientific insights into these questions. Each force of nature is separately fitted into the jigsaw puzzle of global environmental change. The revised edition of this widely praised book draws on the dramatic evidence of recent years to evaluate the state of the planet—and man's effect on it—in the new century. 275 illustrations, 135 in color.
Winds of Fury, Circle of Grace: Life After the Palm Sunday Tornadoes
by Dale Clem
from Abingdon Press
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