A class of Iowa State University students got a first hand look at severe weather this spring in a course on identifying how storms develop.
Dave Floury is one of the course instructors. “Our students have wanted something like this for some time, a lot of prospective students have visited have been asking if we have such a kind of a storm chasing class. We have to hesitate, we didn’t call it officially storm chasing, so we went with field observations of thunderstorms,” he says. Floury, who is in the Atmospheric Sciences Department at ISU, says some students had been storm chasing, but wanted a more structured and safe experience.
“They want to go out and learn about tornadoes, learn about severe thunderstorms, see them in person and not necessarily just do it on their own but kind of do it within a class where they can learn some of the background some of the structure and some of the science behind it as well,” Floury says. He says they talked about the science of how thunderstorms and tornadoes form, and then went on an eight-day trip to observe them.
“There’s really no better classroom for something like this than being out in the field. You can talk about it all day and write it down on paper, but actually seeing it with your own eyes and saying, you know, that’s what we talked about, that’s how tornadoes form, that’s how thunderstorms form, there’s really no better way to do it,” Floury says. Their trip started in central Kansas, when to northeastern Colorado, then southwest Iowa and southwest Kansas. They also got a tour of the national Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.
And they finished up by running with storms in northern Oklahoma and southwest Missouri.
(By Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City)