The Weather Notebook: Weather Tourism

Weather Tourism
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Dave Thurlow, Host

Lightning striking the Eiffel Tower, June 3, 1902.NOAA Photo Collection
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook. While most 'normal' people seek to vacation where the weather is sunny, there are those who plan holidays around spectacularly awful weather. A blissful holiday may include being stranded on the Monterey Peninsula when 40-foot El Nino-driven waves washed out the highway, which thrilled a few weather tourists in 1997-98.

Weather tourists photograph hurricanes, follow Pacific windstorms, hunt down lightning displays in the mountains of New Mexico with lightning detector equipped cars. To meet this new demand, an outfit called Storm Chasing Adventure Tours will take you on a two-week whirlwind road trip through Tornado Alley in quest of fiery lightning, explosive thunderheads, double rainbows, backlit wall clouds, and actual tornado touchdowns -- all for the low price of $1600 (excluding motel and meals)!!

Weather tourists may seem eccentric, a touch weird even, but there's a lot of them. A quick Internet search turns up half a dozen storm-chasing outfits operating out of Texas and Oklahoma. Pacific resort communities have begun touting 'storm watching' as a prime activity during the tempestuous winter months, and some hotels even offer weekend packages featuring sheltered hot tubs and punishing waves. Armchair weather tourists have boosted the ratings of television series like 'Storm Warning' and 'Raging Planet' with their vivid footage of flood waters swirling through suburban neighborhoods, lightning bolts igniting forest fires, and hurricane winds blowing roofs off houses.

Forget the Grand Canyon and the Eiffel Tower. Next vacation, why not experience some monumentally wretched weather? As any weather tourist can tell you, the greatest show on earth is in the sky.

Thanks today to contributing writer David Laskin and for more information on weather tourism, be sure to visit our website at weathernotebook.org. Thanks to Subaru and the National Science Foundation.