Storm Chaser, Brian Barnes

Welcome to the Original Storm Chase Website, operated by Brian Barnes!  Brian is the manager and tour director of StormTours.com and provides hundreds of people with exclusive tours into the heart of Tornado Alley year after year in search of nature's most extreme weather - tornadoes!

"Brian Barnes is to extreme weather what Steve Irwin is to extreme animals." - John Gibson, Fox News

"When people see Brian pull into their town, they look at him as if he's the fifth horseman of the apocalypse.  They then know a deadly storm is near." - Simon Hancock, BBC

"Oklahoma's Tornado Hunter." - Althea Peterson, Tulsa World

I want to personally thank you for visiting the original storm chase website, stormchase.com.   I hope the site helps ignite your extreme weather curiosity and provides you with useful tips and information on everything from photography to meteorology.

StormChase.com is never finished.   My friends and I are always coming up with things to write about and we'll continue to do so as long as people like you keep returning to read, learn and enjoy the content.

I've been consumed and fascinated with severe storms for as long as I can remember.   There were many late afternoons during my childhood that were spent in a musty, concrete, underground storm shelter in Oklahoma.   Those events all played a vital role in the development of my inquiring mind.   My magnetism to severe storms however did not evolve without risk - I was struck by lightning while watching a rotating supercell and nearly killed by an F4 tornado in eastern Oklahoma, all before I even turned 18.   We all learn from our mistakes, as long as we live through our mistakes.  Fortunately for me, I did.

Pryor Oklahoma TornadoI was also fortunate enough to have been raised in a town that had its own history with tornadoes.  In 1942, a large, violent tornado struck Pryor, Oklahoma and destroyed nearly everything in its wake, including my grandfather's rural homestead.    Everyone that played a major role in my childhood development from my teachers to my church elders to my father and grandparents had a story to tell about that fateful day in the hills of eastern Oklahoma.    My young mind absorbed those stories and I wanted to learn more, I wanted to help provide information to the people that issued tornado warnings.  I wanted to help increase the lead time that people caught in the path of a potentially deadly tornado would have in order to save their lives, time that the 100 people who lost their lives in my hometown didn't have.

I realize that there are many others out there with the same addiction and allurement to severe weather that I have and who want to learn more about these incredible processes of nature.   So, I have created this website and have put together one of the most highly skilled teams of meteorologists and storm chasers ever assembled to provide storm chasing tours across Tornado Alley with StormTours.com

I hope you enjoy this site, and if so, I hope that you'll ride with us as we set out on new adventures to hunt down the best and the worst that Mother Nature has to throw at us.  But most of all, I hope that you learn everything you want to know about supercells, tornadoes and other forms of extreme weather.

I'll see'ya in Tornado Alley!

 

 

 
 

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