JM: I caught the chasing bug early-in college! I was interning on Capitol Hill in the summer of 1991, and as Hurricane Bob approached the East Coast, I just decided: “I need to get in that!” I was too young to rent a car, so I jumped on a train for NYC, and then another for Providence as the cyclone raced up the coast. Additionally, as a Southern California guy, you don't even live in an area which sometimes gets tropical activity. But chasing requires some innate sense of anticipation-and I feel I have adequate instincts there, despite not totally understanding the physics behind what’s happening.ĬWG: Hurricane chasers have to, mostly, be more ready than your average tornado chaser to hop on a flight and travel into completely unknown territory to meet their target. One area I don’t touch is forecasting-I leave that to others. This aside, I’m a history nerd: on the off-season, I do detailed research about the big, historic storms-so I’m a walking almanac of hurricane history. I mean, I’ve been in more hurricanes than most meteorologists, and years of analyzing radar imagery and correlating that to what I experience on the ground has given me an intimate knowledge of hurricane structure and wind fields. JM: I have no formal training-I just have a passion for the subject and a ton of in-the-field experience.

Have you had any formal meteorological education? Do you enjoy the art of forecasting, or would you consider your specialty to be something else when it comes to tropical weather? Of course, one doesn't have to be a meteorologist to be a weather nut, but maybe it's a little harder to explain! Regardless, I'd say you arguably know as much about the subject as many trained in the field, especially given your long-term and wide-ranging interest in the subject. It made a strong impression on me.ĬWG: As noted in the introduction, you're not a meteorologist. I was a toddler and it crossed the Island overnight, so I don’t remember the storm itself-just waking up to a world transformed. The other was Hurricane Belle in 1976, which really clobbered my neighborhood on Long Island, NY. One was the tornado scene in “The Wizard of Oz”-I just thought that was so awesome, the way everything goes nuts as the funnel nears the house.

Josh Morgerman (JM): I think it’s a combo of two things. You can follow his travels on, YouTube, and Facebook.

Jm storm it take a more effort