Correction: This story has been modified from its original version. — This article has been modified from its original version to accurately reflect the scale used and the name of one participant.
When the television flashes a foreboding “tornado warning — seek cover” message, senior geography major Kathern Prociv likes to think that she knows better than to obey the presumptive machine.
“It only makes me head directly outside to watch the action,” Prociv said.
Although Blacksburg has already attracted a number of severe summer storms, Prociv is part of a 10-member team that seeks out treacherous weather patterns in the Great Plains to chase and study what she refers to as “real storms.”
The Hokie Storm Chasers is a group of students led by Tech professor Dave Carroll that takes an annual trip to the Midwest for approximately two weeks each spring to chase storm patterns. The idea behind the Chasers is to bolster classroom learning with real-life experience in the field of meteorology — and students often find themselves experiencing storms that become all-too real.
It’s these fleeting moments that have kept Prociv coming back to the field of meteorology. Being on the Hokie Storm Chasers team for the first time this May, Prociv was finally understanding all of her classroom learning as well as igniting her passion for the exhilaration of severe storms.
“For me there’s a big difference between learning definitions and diagrams, and then going out and experiencing something with my own eyes,” Prociv said.
One such experience occurred when following a particularly volatile storm cell. Each Chaser truly felt the power of the tornado they were observing.
“I’d read about in text books how if you’re especially close to a really powerful tornado, your ears will pop,” Prociv said.
She recalls that as the tornado passed, the team members’ ears popped, “which means if we were close enough for that to happen, we were pretty damn close,” Prociv said. She remembers that even after reading about that type of physical reaction, she and her teammates were still surprised.
A version of this article appeared in the Jun 3 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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