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In his new book, "Tornado Alley," (Oxford University Press) Bluestein combines 20 years of research into severe storms with his impressive photographs of tornadoes and clouds. Difficult to predict and in many ways still mysterious, tornadoes are atmospheric science's last frontier, according to Bluestein. He spoke with me by phone from his home in Boulder, where he lives part of the year.

How did you become a professional tornado chaser?

I started doing this over 20 years ago when I was a graduate student in meteorology at MIT. I'd always been interested in severe storms. My next-door neighbor, Ed Kestler, was at the time the director of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla. He asked me if I'd like to come out to there to study storms. I went out, liked what I saw. I was not aware that people were chasing storms there, but they had already started a few years earlier.

When we first started chasing, we were just going out to take photographs. We were sort of like Darwin or Wallace, just cataloging what was out there.

Because you didn't have all the technology you have now?

Right. Plus, not too many people had seen tornadoes. Back in those days, tornado observations were not usually made by scientists. People just happened to be at the right place at the right time, and took photographs or shot a movie. No one had systematically gone out to study these things.

By going out and seeing a lot of them, we began to realize that there was architectural structure to these storms. From that, we were able to help spotters look at a storm, and determine where the tornado might occur.

Combining the improvements in technology and all you've learned by studying, are you better able to predict storms?

Yes. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Doppler radar was also being tested for meteorological use. Using the radar, people would look inside a storm for signs of rotation. By doing that, they were able to develop a system for warning people. If there's an area highly rotating inside a thunderstorm, it's possible that a tornado might form within 20 or 30 minutes. That's the basis for tornado warnings right now. But when storms have this rotation, they don't always produce tornadoes. There are a lot of false alarms.

How do you decide when to warn people?

Whenever there's strong rotation they warn. As a result, there's over-warning. What we're trying to do now is discover why some storms produce tornadoes and others don't. We need to go out and make measurements with radars that are brought really close to the tornado.

How close do you get?

One or two miles.

Have you ever been so close to a storm that you thought it might come at you?

We've been two blocks from tornadoes. But we were not worried. We could see how they were moving.

Next page | Reality vs. "Twister"