In which I reveal my recipe for creating storm masks! A hand-painted face mask featuring a tornado. Read on to find out how I create masks like this. I’ve enjoyed painting for as long as I can remember. In high school, I produced a 6-foot-tall depiction of the 1980 Roseville, Minnesota tornado for a mural depicting the history of the city. (With no images of the actual tornado at my disposal, I settled for a frame from a film of a 1960s Salina, Kansas tornado instead.) Becoming a “professor mommy” meant my painting had to take a backseat to child care and academic responsibilities for several ..read more

Do field experiences really matter that much to meteorology students? You bet, and I’ve got evidence! My more ardent followers may recall that in 2016, Dr. Dan Dawson and I started a ‘storm chasing’ course called “Students of Purdue Observing Tornadic Thunderstorms for Research”, or SPOTTR for short. We want students to get a taste of what severe storms field work is like, so we incorporate all the elements of a real field program, including research-quality instruments. SPOTTR has grown very popular over the past four years, to the point where we have students apply by essay for a limited num ..read more

I was quoted in a recent blog post by Dr. Bob Henson regarding the legacy of the late Dr. Ted Fujita. This post was released in the build-up to a new television documentary about Fujita’s life, scheduled to premiere 19 May 2020 as part of the PBS series American Experience. Definitely appointment viewing! Here’s a longer version of the essay that I sent Bob: As a tornado nerd growing up in Minnesota in the 1980s, Dr. Tetsuya (Ted) Fujita was a supernatural figure. Much of what I knew about him, I learned from the compilation “Tornado Video Classics”, as well as reading some of his papers at m ..read more

One of the core tenets of my teaching philosophy is that people learn more outside their comfort zones than inside. These past six weeks working from home have reinforced that lesson to me in an indelible way. Like many academics, I’ve been faced with restricted access to my campus, virtualization of my resources, a sudden pivot to remote teaching, and the added challenge of handling child care responsibilities during working hours. My academic responsibilities, on paper, are unchanged – I’m still expected to be putting in at least forty hours a week on my research and teaching responsibilitie ..read more

Dan Dawson and I recently cancelled our annual field trip course, Students of Purdue Observing Tornadic Thunderstorms for Research (SPOTTR), which was due to take place in late May. It was a painful decision. Many of our contemporaries at other institutions are also cancelling their “storm chasing” courses, owing to the recent outbreak of coronavirus/COVID-19 that’s kept most Americans confined in our homes. The rationale for our decision was fairly simple: During our field trip, we generally travel all over the Great Plains, stopping in small towns to grab food, use bathrooms, and stay at hot ..read more

Four years ago, Dan and I started a new course at Purdue entitled Severe Storms Field Work. One of the students dubbed it Students of Purdue Observing Tornadic Thunderstorms for Research (SPOTTR), which became the unofficial class moniker. Our objective is to give students a taste of real severe weather research by involving them on our field programs, while teaching them the basics of severe storms forecasting and research techniques. All this happens in a scant four weeks. SPOTTR’s grown into a small phenomenon over the years, attracting students from outside atmospheric science and even fro ..read more