They Chase Rainbows--and Rain

When Stephen Andreae talks about storms, his voice quickens like a teen-ager describing his latest crush.

The Burbank TV engineer would chase storms full time if he didn’t have to work--jumping into his car to follow dark clouds into the desert or going places where the air smells of rain and the fury of nature makes your hair stand on end.

When it rains in Burbank, or the wind kicks up and trees bend over in the hills, and the National Weather Service--despite its globe-watching satellites--needs someone to check if creeks are rising or streets are flooding, Andreae and others like him come in very handy.

They are “weather spotters,” volunteers who phone the weather service when the rain or wind seems to be getting out of hand. There are 500 of them in Southern California, including about 200 in Los Angeles County.

Their ranks include professional storm chasers such as scientists who fly through hurricanes to gather data, amateur weather buffs who dash out to take pictures of impending thundershowers and thrill to the power of the elements, and retirees who phone in reports of alarming weather developments as a community service.

“We have all this modern technology today that does everything except tell us what’s going on on the ground,” said Tim McClung, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Oxnard. “That’s where the spotters come in.”

The weather service can track pressure systems and impending storms around the globe, McClung said, and has monitoring devices to track the intensity of rainfall at ground level. But these high-tech rain gauges alone cannot accurately predict flash floods and other strictly local problems.

Spotters, McClung explained, phone in when the weather in their area gets nasty. Since the weather varies from community to community, a volunteer in one place could report dense fog while another across town phones in rain.

The weather service made a particular point of recruiting spotters in the San Fernando Valley after the devastating floods of 1992, when a teen-age boy was washed to his death in a Los Angeles River flood control channel and stranded motorists were plucked from their cars in the Sepulveda Basin by helicopters.

When they sign up, volunteers are offered rain gauges and a subscription to “Weather or Not,” a newsletter for spotters. Edited by McClung, the newsletter includes an “Ask the Meteorologist” column and a crossword puzzle with weather-related clues.

Pat Cervantes, a retired office manager who lives in Pasadena, signed up two years ago after flooding in the fire-ravaged San Gabriel Valley foothills shook loose boulders the size of Volkswagen bugs. She sees it as community service.

To Jim Swinney, it’s a calling.

Jim is 17, a junior at Arcadia High School and a bona-fide weather nut.

“I am a cloud,” the teen-ager wrote in a poem for school.

“I feel the wind push me. I worry that I will dissolve. I cry on the city.”

Jim wants to be a meteorologist--and a professional storm chaser. Clouds, he said, remind him of a family--they all come together, then sometimes there is a big explosion and they dissipate. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, there’s a rainbow.

He likes to go up to Mt. Wilson and lie on his back, knees up slightly as if he were getting ready to do some sit-ups, and let the storms wash over him.

“I’ve had a very bad past,” he said. “I go up there and think things through.”

To storm lovers, said Roy Kamen, a spotter who lives in West Covina, a cloudburst is a real-life miracle.

“It’s like looking at a sunset or anything of beauty, only it’s rare, so it’s more than just a sunset,” he said. “When you see a really large waterfall or the Grand Canyon, nature is just so spectacular that you’re awe-struck. That’s the feeling I get.”

Kamen reads magazines just for storm chasers featuring photos of spectacular storms and tales of derring-do by their pursuers. Like Andreae, who has watched a recent TV special on Hurricane Hugo three times, he looks for weather programs on television and monitors the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration radio station.

Once, Kamen said, he was out jogging at UCLA during a thunderstorm, and lightning struck a football goal post just five feet away.

“I felt the hairs on my body stand up” from the electricity, he said. “It smelled like everything burned around me.” The goal post, he said, sizzled in the rain.

Bob Gregg, a Glendale developer, has been tracking wind and rain since 1952, when he got his weather merit badge as a Boy Scout.

Now, he has just about all the equipment an amateur can have--including an instrument that charts the speed of the wind every three seconds--and a network of friends who are prepared to fax him weather information from all over the world.

Gregg loves storms, but he distances himself somewhat from the real swashbuckling storm-chasers. His kind of weather enthusiast is more of a climatologist, he said, carefully recording minute changes in the daily weather and comparing rainfall and temperature in different parts of the world.

Climatologists, agreed Rich Gerston, concentrate on the detail side of observing weather. Both he and Gregg spend hours at the end of each month carefully recording every hundredth of an inch of rain and every bit of wind.

Gerston, who lives in Van Nuys and teaches English as a second language, has a degree in geography and says that, given a description of the type of climate you like, he can tell you where in the world you should live. Someone who likes seasonal changes but doesn’t like scorching summers and subzero winters might like the Sierra Nevada, or parts of New Mexico.

There’s a little bit of storm chaser even in the careful climatologists, though.

“I subscribe to a magazine about weather disasters in the United States,” Gregg said.

“Every month it says who was hit by lightning, who was washed away in a flood. It’s just so interesting to me.”

But, Gregg said, there’s a limit to how much danger he is willing to expose himself to in his pursuit of rough weather. You won’t find him out in the elements, following a tornado like the scientists and serious storm buffs who gather in Oklahoma every year with their maps, rain gauges and station wagons. Not so Jim Swinney.

After two years at junior college and two more at either the University of Oregon or the University of Miami studying meteorology, he hopes to find a job that will put him in the middle of a whirlwind.

“I think it’s all fun, no matter what you do,” he said, weighing the possibilities of working for the National Weather Service or being a weather reporter for TV. “I just want to be outside chasing the storm.”