Weather Gods

Name: Tania Banyard
Tour: Tour is not registered
Year: 2013

General review

Tour Date 11th May - 18th May 2013. Travelled from England to Kansas. Very disappointing trip. Plus points 1st met a great couple from Texas. Saw some great national monuments, very scenic road trip and Jason our driver was faultless. Minus points weather was not favorable cannot blame anyone for that. Only saw 2 storms, missed a huge tornado in Texas as out of the area. Out of the 2 storms we did see although tornadoes did touch down we were not in the right location to see any of them. 100% success rate has dropped to zero for this trip. If you call dirt devils tornadoes and clouds that have a vague pointy shape possible funnels then you will not be as disappointed as I was. Equipment on the van was just a laptop showing Internet sites that anyone has access to, a weather radio constantly giving repeated broadcasts and a ham radio. No experiments were carried out and other equipment quoted on the website was not apparent. One of the other tourists who also had the same internet sites on his laptop seemed to have a better "feel" for where storms were rotating that did produce tornadoes and were completely dismissed by the tour leader Mark Lingl. I feel that we as tourists were misled by the hype. No doubt the video camera that the tour leader had running constantly through the windshield during storms may produce some interesting footage that can be popped onto his website as evidence that the storms were tornadic but as tourists in the back of the van as it was driving along would not have been able to witness these events and being told whilst on the road chasing a storm "wow guys look at that" .. Out of the front windshield was to say the least very frustrating. Our final chase day was most disappointing as we left a storm early passing by many other chasers including the weather channel with Doppler. As we were driving down the highway we could hear on the radio that tornadoes had been sighted and had been caught by the weather channel team. By then it was too late as we were heading away from the storm to find a hotel for the night before heading home the next day. Information given during the trip was interesting but I can honestly say that watching the weather channel was just as informative !! Will I go chasing again - yes definitely hopefully next year but I will be choosing a large company with better equipment and less hype next time.
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Name: Stephanie Holt
Tour: Tour is not registered
Year: 2013

General review

May 11 - May 18th 2013 chase tour. I picked this tour based on the wonderful footage, information and reviews from the Weather Gods site and this site as well. So hopefully I can shed some light on the deception and address some of the hype that is on the Weather Gods site. 1. First of all, we had little to none of the chasing equipment that was mentioned on their site. The site boasted.......We have an air conditioned 15 passenger van that we will be chasing in. Only 8 customers per van will allow everyone to have a window seat. (We will have GPS navigational equipment, laptop computers, lightning detector, in motion satellite tracking, satellite receivers, PDA with cellular connections, anemometers, thermo hygrometers, thermometers, barometers, weather radios, and ham radios). In REALITY we had a rented van with a weather radio, ham radio, gps for travel and our guide's laptop. 2. Second of all, I was disappointed in our guides ability to read and predict storms. Another boast on the WG site was......(For any tornado chaser, getting weather information on the road is important, but the skill lies in how you interpret it). Well REALITY was we completely missed the Texas tornadoes because we were too far North waiting for storms that never really panned out. The guests and weather stations seemed to be more in tune with where the big storms where more than our guide. I did recorded a short tornado that touched ground while we were driving away from the storm. Our 3rd and last storm was the worst. Again, moving away from the storm, we passed up several spotters and a DOPPLER truck because our guide felt the tornado would show up elsewhere. I felt that nearly 50 spotters and a dopper truck could not be too bad to hang with. And I was right,they got to see some tornadoes and we got to see pictures of those spotters and doppler truck with a tornado in the background on the tv later that night. Seemed like we were doing more tornado avoiding than chasing. Also that last day we chased, we stopped chasing 2 hours before sunset when there were still tornadoes popping up in the area we left. Got to see that on tv too. Did learn much about the weather. Saw lots of 2 second funnel clouds. Lots of dirt devils that I imagined were tornadoes. Saw some cool historic sites on on good weather and avoiding days. Learned some cool weather web sites as well as the storm chaser spotter site. Very nice driver that got us safely everywhere. However, he seemed like a very nervous driver. Seemed to need constant reassurance from our guide when weather condition were not ideal.Such as rain on a well driven county dirt road. Would like to tour again but with a different company.
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