Storm Chasers is a one-hour weekly American documentary reality television series that premiered on October 17, 2007 on the Discovery Channel. The program follows several teams of storm chasers as they attempt to intercept tornadoes in "Tornado Alley" in the United States.
Storm Chasers is filmed primarily during late spring and early summer each year in the central United States, the time of the most frequent tornado activity. Several teams of storm chasers appear in the series.
During the 2007 and 2008 seasons Joshua Wurman, a renowned atmospheric scientist and creator of the Doppler On Wheels (DOW), teamed with Sean Casey, a documentary IMAX filmmaker. Josh's goal is to collect tornado data in order to improve warnings systems, while Sean's goal is to film footage inside a tornado using his armored Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV).
The TIV crew is pioneered by Sean Casey, who is aided by Ronan Nagle, driver and former co-executive Producer, now executive producer as of 2009, of the series, and Byron Turk, navigator and a shooter/producer for the show. The TIV is also outfitted with weather instruments that collect data from approximately 12 feet above ground that, when combined with the DOW radar imagery and the probe data, can help to give Josh a more complete picture of a tornado's structure.
Beginning in 2008, the program also began following the team from the website TornadoVideos.net (TVN) led by meteorology Ph.D. candidate Reed Timmer, Joel Taylor (Driver/Meteorologist) and Chris Chittick (Photographer/Probe Technician). The goal of Reed's small but highly mobile team is to capture "extreme video" as well as scientific data from tornadoes.
During the 2009 season, the series also documented the TWISTEX team, led by engineer and veteran storm chaser Tim Samaras. The main purpose of the TWISTEX team is to deploy their "turtle" probes into the path of tornadoes. This new season also brought a change to Sean Casey's team, replacing the TIV with the TIV2 later on in the chasing season.
The original Scout, PROBE, TWISTEX and TVN vehicles all carry probes that are designed to be placed in the projected path of tornadoes to collect data and film footage from the lowest portion of the tornado.
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