By the time a severe weather alert interrupts a favorite television program, people have already tracked the storm and put themselves within storm’s reach all in the name of keeping the public informed. Whether it’s documenting a hurricane’s landfall or tracking a tornado’s turbulent path, these weather chasers are following every detail of a storm with a scientist’s eye and an adventurer’s spirit.

Mark Sudduth, founder of Wilmington-based Hurricane Intercept Research Team, has made a career out of helping people stay informed through his expertise in hurricanes. He’s a self-proclaimed hurricanologist.

“It’s strange to have the urge to be in a hurricane, or anything dangerous like storms or fires, but some people are just born with a knack for weather and have a connection with it,” Sudduth says.

Sudduth has used his knowledge of hurricanes to educate others on hurricane preparedness. “I’m like a hurricane PR firm,” he says. With modern technology, meteorologists and scientists are able to recognize weather patterns that are conducive to hurricanes and track hurricanes as they form, but what they can’t do is accurately predict the path of a storm and the destruction it can have. That’s where Sudduth’s team comes in.

With their equipment, they record valuable information as a hurricane makes landfall. This information is used by scientists to help understand the inner workings of a hurricane, determine patterns and develop reaction plans to keep people safe.
“Not only can we watch it and learn in real time, but we can study it later,” Sudduth says.

Sudduth notes that the use of time-lapse photography has been significant in capturing information that is otherwise hard to record, like how quickly flooding can happen. “Video is exciting and dramatic, but it’s not as scientific as time-lapse photography,” Sudduth says. “When you speed up nature in time-lapse photography you can learn the patterns.”

In addition to helping scientists better understand how hurricanes operate, Sudduth also works to educate people about the destruction hurricanes can cause. “People are so detached from the weather these days,” Sudduth says. “And it’s ironic because with television and Internet, it’s so much more in your face, but it’s like we take it for granted. You can only learn so much from a Twitter update. We’re trying to get people re-engaged and motivated to take action. We hope we’ve saved a few lives with our work.”

When John Mullen of Garner was just 3 years old, his mother would often wake up in the morning to find him fast asleep in front of the television set to the Weather Channel. Mullen says his fascination with weather started very early in life. As a child, he was given a meteorology textbook and by the time he was in middle school, he had read the book cover to cover multiple times.

But at 14, he got the opportunity he’d been dreaming of for a decade—the chance to chase a storm and see everything he had been reading about for years. “I was with my uncle who was always supportive of my interest in weather. We chased a storm in Fuquay-Varina and I thought, ‘Wow, I could do this every day’,” Mullen says.

At 16, he teamed up with a professional storm chaser whom he met online, Doug Drace, from Oklahoma. Drace was one of the first people to record professional footage of a storm chase, and he taught Mullen everything he knew about chasing.
The night before a storm would hit, the pair would stay up all night forecasting the path of the storm and prospecting where the best place to intercept it would be.

“There’s a science to it,” Mullen says. “You want to observe the storm on the southeastern side, typically. You never want to core punch it.” Core punching is a term storm chasers use to reference driving straight into and through the core of the storm. “It’s really hard to know what’s on the other side of that core, and that’s where the storm is the most dangerous. All it takes is core punching in the wrong direction at the wrong time and it can be a really bad situation.”

While Mullen likes the thrill of the chase, it’s his interest in weather and the public service aspect that draw him to storm chasing. Mullen is a SkyWarn spotter and regularly calls in real-time information from his chases to help meteorologists see what’s happening on the ground. “They rely on us for accurate, reliable information, because they’re stationary,” Mullen says.

Information people like Mullen provide helps meteorologists learn more about the way weather unfolds. “For tornadoes, we’ve been able to go from a one-minute warning to a 10-or 15-minute warning,” Mullen says. “If I can help just one person, it’s like all the hard work and cramming I’ve done for the past 10 years is worth it.”