The dangers of storm chasing.

While I'm sorry they became the victims of what they were chasing, I question how much protection the role provides. My feeling is that behind everything is the trill of seeing something like this up close, ideally as this example shows, not too close, and getting some good pics. I do acknowledge that some chasers do scientific work, but I wonder what the percentage is, versus the thrill of the chase? Were they caught in a traffic jam or something like that? (thought I heard something about it.)

 

From what I read the storm changed directions at the last second and they weren't able to get away in time.

There are definitely many of these storm chasers who do it now just for the thrill or just so they can have the coolest pictures on facebook, and that's extremely reckless and dangerous, and when I first saw that storm chasers had been killed, I expected it to be one of those groups, but that wasn't what these guys do.

These guys were legit scientists and meteorologists who have been chasing tornados for 20+ years. I believe one of the articles I read indicated they were trying to place ground-based doppler radar units right in the path of the tornado (literally like the movie twister) to try to get more measurements inside the tornado.

While you can't directly attribute these guys work to saving specific lives, there's no doubt the work that them (and the other legitimate scientist chasers) do has saved countless lives in the past few decades by advancing our knowledge of how the storms form and work and increasing warning times. Tornados like the EF5 that hit Moore used to be much more deadly in the past even though the areas they hit were much less populated than they are now. The work these men and their colleges have done has increased warning times from literally a minute or two when the tornado was basically already on top of you to the 10-15 minute warning times that Moore had which allowed so many people to get into storm shelters.

 

I've met Tim Samaras. Came to my department in the past. RIP

 

That couldn't have been a pleasant death. But they died while performing a valuable service, and they loved it. If there is such thing as an honorable death, I think these three have achieved it.