Spring is in the air. The birds are chirping, the grass is green and the flowers are blooming. It all means one thing: Tornado season is approaching, and Darin Brunin couldn’t be happier.

Brunin, a Rossville sophomore in meteorology, is the kind of guy who runs to his car instead of to the basement when tornado sirens wail. He’s a storm chaser. Along with about 10 other KU students and Lawrence residents, he spends his spring roaming the Great Plains in search of storms, particularly storms with tornadoes.

Brunin’s love for storms began on April 26, 1991 — he can rattle off the date without hesitation. That spring day he saw a small tornado pass by his house and has been fascinated by them ever since. He started chasing toward the end of his high school career and has been doing it ever since. Last year he went on 14 chases, spotting a photographically confirmed nine tornadoes. His average is pretty good, considering how difficult finding a tornado can be.

“It’s not like Twister,” Brunin says. “You can’t just turn a corner on a road and have a tornado there.” Chases can last for hours or even days, and spotting a tornado is never guaranteed.

It’s still exciting, but not for the reasons that most people think. He and fellow chaser Stuart Manning say that their real drive to chase doesn’t come from the adrenaline rush that being in harm’s way can provide, but from their fascination with storms. Manning, Washington senior, says that he likes the challenge of trying to find the storms and get in the right position to see them clearly. Brunin, on the other hand, says he is captivated by the machine-like complexity of storms. Both say that storm chasers’ potential to save lives by warning news stations of tornadoes’ whereabouts also helps.

While Brunin doesn’t make any money from his chasing, which can cost him $40 to $60 per chase (he avoids staying in hotels to save some cash), he does have a deal with the television station, WIBW in Topeka to get reimbursed for his gas money if he provides them with footage of tornadoes.

Veteran chaser Roger Hill, 47, of Denver is one of the lucky few who manages to make most of his living from storm chasing. He co-owns Silver Lining Tours, a storm chasing tour company. Ten times a year, Hill takes a van with 15 people in it — who have each paid between $270 and $350 per day to be there — on a chase.

It may seem like a lot of money to pay for something that you might not even get to see, but his record of finding storms is good. Right now, Hill is in the process of providing evidence to the Guinness Book of World Records to prove that he holds the record for most tornadoes seen in one year: 51 in 2004. He’s seen 241 in his lifetime.

Storm chasing started with a man named Roger Jensen, Hill says, who chased his first storm during the summer of 1953 in North Dakota. Tim Marshall, editor of Stormtrack magazine, says Jensen was a pioneer for the hobby who took about 8,000 slides of storms before he passed away on April 26, 2001. Since the summer of ‘53, the number of storm chasers has grown to somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 nationwide, Hill estimates. The hobby grew steadily during the ‘80s and ‘90s before exploding in popularity following the release of the 1996 movie Twister.

Although the notoriety from Twister and subsequent interest in storm chasing was not intrinsically a bad thing, many chasers have been quick to point out the problems it has generated. With so many more people on the road in a storm, some predict that the government might be forced to step in and regulate chasing. It seems especially likely after an incident in Mulvane on June 12 last year in which a collection of storm chasers’ vehicles blocked emergency vehicles from reaching tornado-damaged homes.

Another problem is the inherent increase in the number of so-called “yahoos” to the scene. Yahoos are chasers who do stupid and dangerous things like driving too fast on wet pavement or getting too close to a tornado. With the sheer quantity of chasers – yahoos and otherwise – on the road, Hill says he’s surprised that there haven’t been a bunch of deaths. In fact, to date there has been only one documented death of a chaser in the field, which occurred when an Oklahoma meteorology student hydroplaned during the ‘80s. But Hill says it’s only a matter of time.

“It’s going to happen soon,” Hill says. “I thought sure it was going to happen this year, but we got lucky.”

The dangerous nature of the hobby is part of the reason that Donna Tucker, associate professor of geography, discouraged the student chaser Brunin from starting a KU storm chasing club. There had been a club during the late ‘80s to early ‘90s, but there was an incident in which a girl was hit and severely hurt by lightning. Eventually, the club broke up. Tucker says she advised Brunin not to do a club through the University to avoid potential lawsuits should an injury occur.

There are ways to minimize the risks of storm chasing. Hill suggests four things: get storm-spotter training from the National Weather Service, read up on the subject – there’s plenty of information on the Internet, go with someone experienced for your first few times and “for God’s sake, don’t get under an overpass in a storm.” (At this point he’s referring to popular footage of amateur storm chasers escaping a tornado by ducking under an overpass, though it was sheer luck that they survived. Overpasses actually increase wind speeds by forcing the wind into a tighter area. Three people who thought an overpass would save them from an approaching tornado died under one on May 3, 1999.) Hill also says that carpooling would be a good way to minimize the excessive number of chase vehicles on the road.

In the end, storm chasing will always be a dangerous past time but a worthwhile one as well, Brunin says. And by doing what he loves – following and watching storms – he hopes to be in a position to help save lives this spring.