“So what is a full setup for storm chasing?” I asked curiously.
“You can storm chase with just a phone with a radar and a camera,” Ethan Roberts, sophomore digital media communications major, said. “And it really doesn’t matter as long as you know how to be safe and can get the data you need.”
I raised my eyebrows with surprise. In the whole of my conversation with Roberts about his longtime serious hobby of storm chasing, I had been imagining something like a repurposed crime lab shoved in the back of his car – full of computers, blinking lights and pop-up radar discs. As he continued to describe the minimal equipment he actually used, I began to understand that this was not as unapproachable an endeavor as I had thought. A laptop, a few cameras, a phone and several number-crunching programs served him quite well as he sped from Kentucky to Arkansas.
“The main thing I’m trying to get for my setup now is instincts,” Roberts said. “For a lot of storm chasing, once you get in the field, it’s going to be instincts and knowing what you’re looking at and that goes beyond equipment.”
I had known of Roberts’ hobby back in our freshman year, and according to him that was around the time he was just starting to get serious about tracking down storm cells throughout the southern region. It was not a sudden interest, however. He began to be interested in all things weather when he was much younger.
“I’ve always been interested in the weather since I was a kid,” Roberts said. “I can remember nights when I would stay up until 2 a.m. watching lightning outside my window. And then I watched the Alabama and Mississippi 2011 super outbreak of tornados that happened, that was what really hooked me.”
As soon as he was old enough to pursue it, he began to follow major storms in the Dixie Alley, often traveling in convoy with other passionate chasers. Recently, he told me with admiration in his voice, he was able to go on a chase with the famous meteorologist and storm chaser Reed Timmer for six hours over multiple states.
Hearing his stories of high winds and falling trees did not make me all that keen on trying his hobby out, but Roberts explained to me that although the undertaking might seem risky, he does not see why it should be if you take the right precautions.
“Personal risk while storm chasing is shockingly low, if you know what you’re doing,” Roberts said confidently. “The number one rule is, if you’re in the way of a storm, go south, so it’s not running towards you.”
He began to coach me on ways to avoid the worst of the storm while chasing as close as you could, using terms like “bear trap”, “the hook echo” and “core-punch.” It wasn’t convincing me to try it myself, but I could begin to see the excitement and fascination that had hooked him into this hobby.
Storm chasing is not the only hobby he has had by a long shot, though. He has also dabbled in a myriad of others, including video editing, photography, music producing and writing his own music for a while, all while being a full-time student and holding down a job. All this put together meant that I was slightly staggered he could get it all done well.
“Storm chasing isn’t even the most time consuming of [those hobbies],” Roberts said. “It’s actually music producing that consistently takes up a good chunk of my time. And now that I have a job it’s going to be even tighter, but I always end up with enough time.”
In the past, he used to hold down many more casual hobbies at once, dabbling in things that caught his interest or that he just wanted to try out. According to Roberts, he would often keep up the hobby just long enough to understand how it worked, and then would move on to the next thing, whether it seemed to others to relate to his primary interests or not.
“A lot of my hobbies have been little training sessions, where I’m able to develop skill sets and get things I can use in the future,” Roberts said. “A sort of jack-of-all-trades.”
As a military kid, Roberts finds the rapid switching of focus normal, but has also heard from people who get offended by him not being a master at every one of his interests.
“I’ve experienced a number of times the ‘if you’re not all in on this thing then you’re not a real this or that’ and I’ve always felt I don’t think that’s the way,” Roberts said. “I think you can try out a bunch of different hobbies. If you have something as a part of your identity like a career, then yes, you should be very dedicated to that. But I don’t think that if you say you enjoy photography you have to master it. Enjoying it is enough.”
For Roberts, the line is drawn when you begin do things to help other people. Once you are doing it for others, he says, you have a responsibility to be the best you can.
“With storm chasing, I am there to report things that the National Weather Service can’t see,” Roberts said. “I’m there to perform search and rescue if necessary and to give people a heads up. So I need to know what I’m talking about.”
He disagrees, however, with saying you need to be all in on everything you like. Throughout our conversation, he pointed out that his hobbies are his, and not there to please others.
“If you have an interest you are doing for you, and to share with others, put however much you want towards it,” Roberts said. “And as long as you are enjoying it, that’s the point – what the rest say doesn’t matter.”
