Eye on the Twister » About Brad

About Brad

Thank you for visiting my storm chasing website! A little about me…I have been a weather fanatic since my days as a kid and teenager, and I have the dorky weather logs and journals to prove it. Growing up on a small hobby farm in southern MN near the town of Blooming Prairie, I got my fair share of intense summertime thunderstorms and severe weather events growing up. This is what drove me to investigate further as to why these events take place and how to forecast the weather. I have always been completely fascinated in all sorts of weather.

After graduating high school, I decided to pursue Meteorology and Environmental Studies degrees at St Cloud State University. At SCSU, I gained considerable knowledge in the world of Weather and learned how to storm chase after meeting two terrific gals who call themselves the Twister Sisters (you may have heard of them: http://www.twistersisters.com/). In fact, my first “real” storm chase was on June 24th 2003 where we witnessed 13 tornadoes in one day! Since that day in 2003, I have been storm chasing on a regular basis, but have only recently (2007) started putting together chase logs and taking it seriously. This was after being a cast member on a storm chasing reality show called “Twister Sisters” that aired on WE TV in the winter of 2007/2008. Over the past several years, I have seen some incredible weather phenomenon, including everything from tornadoes, massive hail, lightning, flooding, damaging straight line winds, and thunderstorm features that I cannot even comprehend. My love of weather is not only limited to thunderstorms, but also winter and tropical weather as well as long range weather forecasting, El Nino and La Nina events, flooding, dust storms, etc.

I am married as of August, 2008 to a terrific gal named MaryLynn, who also loves to go out on storm chasing adventures with me as much as possible. She has made married life as good as I could have ever imagined and it is great to know that I have a life long chase partner who enjoys chasing as much as I do. Hopefully she can continue to handle the long drives and insanity that storm chasing involves for years to come.

I have been employed as a Meteorologist with Telvent DTN since 2004 and am part of the PGA Tour On-Site Meteorologist team, producing weather forecasts and helping with weather evacuations for various golf tournaments around the country, and even a few in Canada and Mexico. It is an amazing experience to be able to travel all over North America and work as a Meteorologist for the Tour, as well as work for a well established weather company in the private sector.

A few other things about me:

• Cast member in the reality television show “Twister Sisters”, which aired on WE TV in December of 2007 and January of 2008.

• June and July, 2008 → Weather Consultant for the production of “Tornado Road”, which aired on The Weather Channel in late 2009 and early 2010.

• Have seen roughly 45 tornadoes in my lifetime, including several EF-3′s, two EF-4′s in one day (6-17-10 MN), and one EF-5 (Greensburg, KS 2007).

• I really enjoy sports and spend a lot of time paying attention to my favorite teams, which are shown below, starting with by far the most important as I am a HUGE VIKINGS FAN!