Darin Brunin
Throughout the rest of my childhood I remember watching countless hours of the Weather Channel and watching supercells pass through the Kansas River Valley. But the most memorable events for me were the night time mesoscale convective systems that passed through Northeast Kansas. The most memorable of these was a derecho on July 1, 1994 that had recorded wind gusts of 120mph and did tremendous damage in the local area. Towards the end of high school I finally realized that I was tired of waiting on storms to come to me and that's when my storm chasing life began.
When I am not storm
chasing I love to hunt, fish, golf, camp, and canoe and other activities
like those. I have always loved the outdoors and chasing ties into
that very well. I would say that if I was not going to be a
meteorologist I would be a wildlife biologist because that ties into many
of my interests outside of weather. I also play football, tennis,
basketball, and other sports.
Dick McGowan
I was born near South Padre Island, TX and moved to Garden City, KS when I was 8 years old. At the age of 10, in late April, I saw something in the sky and asked my mother if it was a tornado. She assured me it wasn't. Not 10 seconds later, the sirens went off, and shortly after, a tornado would develop just west of Garden City. I remember vividly watching it from the backseat of his father's van, as he sped through the streets to take us to cover. I used to watch the Weather Channel compulsively, with my childhood friend, Seth. We would dream of buying a video camera and following storms working for them when we were old enough to drive. Slowly, those dreams faded away, but my interest was always there. My mother would never let me out of the basement in Garden City, even during a weak thunderstorm. I have always assumed it is because of her paranoia of storms after surviving the Topeka, KS F-5 tornado that destroyed my grandfather's pharmacy in 1966. I had always wondered what was outside, and would occasionally run upstairs to see what I was missing. She would nearly have heart attacks every time I would. At the age of 15 in 1995, after picking my younger sister, Brianne, up from shopping, I saw an ominous cloud north of town and my curiosity took us out there to check it out. About 3 miles up the road, a thin, rope tornado touched down, temporarily paralyzing me by the hypnotic beauty of what would become my passion years down the road. In May of 2003, my high school friend Derek Shaffer and I jumped into my car and drove east of Lawrence, KS, where we witnessed what would become the monster F-4 that would rip through parts of the northern Kansas City metro. My interest in finding out more about tornadoes and how to forecast them, would begin. After seeing major events in 2004, I read up on everything I could to understand the science behind them. Since then, many chasers such as Mike Hollingshead, Amos Magliocco, Shane Adams, Mike Deason and Mike Peregrine would lend me their unselfish, priceless knowledge over the last several years and I am forever grateful for it. I teamed up with Darin Brunin in 2005 and we have chased together ever since. Darin, Derek and I witnessed the birth of the supercell which would spawn the deadly Greensburg tornado on May 4th, 2007, which will be a day that will never be forgotten and be in my thoughts daily, from here on out. In the Summer of 2007, I finally received my Associate's degree from Kansas City Kansas Community College. I am set to enroll at the University of Kansas in the summer of 2008 with GIS as my major. In my spare time, I rarely do anything, but think of ways to chase the next storm or setup. Contrary of the past, I enjoy a simple, quiet lifestyle. In the winter time I enjoy shooting photography, epsecially Kansas sunsets, and am always eager for the next Northern Lights, lunar eclipse, or meteor shower to pass the time until Spring. The two people that I admire most: my father and my grandfather. I have a niece, Keira, who I absolutely adore, and will be the next storm chaser in my family.