For Michael Brown, the emphasis on valuing people and a supportive research environment made Texas Tech his ideal destination for graduate school.

The opening scene of the 1996 movie “Twister” is unforgettable. It’s 1969, and a family and their dog rush into their home’s tornado shelter right as the F5 tornado makes its way through the neighborhood. A young Jo Harding (the main character whose older version is played by Helen Hunt) can only watch in fear as her father desperately holds the shelter’s door shut from the battering winds. 

Suddenly, the door is wrenched open. Jo’s father, still holding onto the door, is pulled into the swirling black abyss. Jo’s mother screams while Jo runs to the entryway, shouting for her father. The scene fades, and the movie jumps forward 27 years.

That is Jo Harding’s origin story of becoming a storm chaser. Dramatic? Certainly. But for Michael Brown, reality isn’t too far from fiction.

“I think most of us in the weather field all have a similar cliché story,” said Brown, a first-year master’s student in atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geosciences at Texas Tech University. “I think we’ve all seen a thunderstorm or something really crazy as a young kid and just got fascinated with the weather.”

That storm for Brown was the 2013 El Reno tornado. This deadly multiple-vortex tornado brought rain, hail and winds over 300 mph. To this day, the tornado still ranks as the widest tornado ever recorded, at 2.6 miles. 

At the time, Brown was in middle school in his hometown in Connecticut. While he and his family were far from the impact of this storm, his life was completely altered just as Jo Harding’s was in “Twister.”   

“I remember watching the news and watching the weather radar on our family computer,” Brown recalled. “It was a very unpredictable and devastatingly strong storm. That really motivated me to try to figure out how these storms work.”

As a meteorology student at North Carolina State University, Brown frequently attended the annual American Meteorological Society conference. When he attended the conference his junior year, Brown had the opportunity to meet and talk with , professor of atmospheric sciences. After a brief discussion, Texas Tech was now on Brown’s radar.

As he began the application process to several programs across the country, Brown cold-emailed professors from each institution.

“I’ll never forget this, but Dr. Weiss reached back to me that same afternoon,” Brown remembered. “I was able to set up a Zoom call with him a couple days later. He was the first big-time professor I had the opportunity to talk to.”

Weiss invited Brown to visit Texas Tech to get a feel for what the program had to offer. While Brown knew he wanted to study severe weather, he also wanted a program that valued its people and built a supportive environment. 

As an undergraduate at NC State, Brown appreciated the camaraderie he and his fellow meteorology students developed. They grew close, spending almost as much time in the lab as they would out of it. During those informal gatherings, they would watch storms and hurricanes develop across the country, relating concepts from class to what they saw in the real world.

Brown immediately saw a similar level of camaraderie during his visit to Texas Tech.

“I got to hang out with the current graduate students here, and I  felt like they weren’t just trying to sell me on the program,” Brown said. “It was like they had a genuine interest in just hanging out together. I felt on some of my visits to other universities that I didn’t really get to see that genuine connection the students had with each other.”

Like a good storm, Brown said Texas Tech stood out in more ways than one.

“I felt like I had the best ease of building a connection with my advisor here,” Brown said. “Plus, having more field work opportunities to take some of the Ka-band mobile radar trucks out and chase storms and collect some really cool data as well drove me here to Tech.” 

It didn’t take long for Brown to know he had made the right decision in picking Texas Tech for his graduate studies.

In his microphysics class, Brown had to complete a project creating Skew-T plot diagrams, vertical profiles of the atmosphere’s air temperature and dew point. It’s a complex project that makes use of various equations to help meteorologists forecast the weather. 

The professor invited Brown and more than 20 other students to his house to work on the project. He also made a huge pot of pasta with meat sauce for everyone to enjoy.

Brown couldn’t help but take in the whole scene. The aroma of tomatoes, garlic bread and various spices and herbs permeated the air. No desks or formal workspaces were in sight; instead, everyone worked in the living room, sitting on couches, the floor or random chairs. Rather than being surrounded by faculty members conducting research, Brown and his fellow students worked in a space simultaneously occupied by the professor’s family and pets. 

This was a moment where people who simply enjoyed being together could work to understand the weather.

“It was great to not only have that teaching relationship with the professor, but we were brought into their home,” Brown said. “We got to see both sides: the academic side and the personal side of things. That’s been a really good sign of what Texas Tech is and what it can offer graduate students.”

Brown has also valued the opportunities the Graduate School and the Graduate Writing Center have offered in his short time at Texas Tech. In one writing group Brown participated in, he was able to practice conveying his research to a broader audience.

“You have this level of familiarity with your research that you can’t expect your audience to share,” Brown said, reflecting on the experience. “I learned how to market my research so other scientists outside of the severe weather umbrella can understand. It’s a writing skill that will be critical and helpful down the road as I apply for grants or my own research funding.”

Brown is analyzing the statistics of several field campaigns conducted in the late 2010s across the southeastern United States. Specifically, he’s looking at data from radars and other instrumentation that mapped quasi-linear convective systems (QLCS), thunderstorms that form in a line along a cold front. Tornados can be more difficult to detect because they are embedded within the QLCS, unlike the supercell storms of the Great Plains. By comparing forecasts with the actual data, Brown hopes to better understand the spread of possibilities in a given forecast based on the initial atmosphere and  improve the predictability of severe thunderstorms.

“It’s almost counterintuitive because the best cases we’re selecting are the ones that were the worst forecast,” he said. “I’m excited to get into this data and make these model runs. It’s interesting for me to understand what the challenges were that forecasters in that time faced.”

Whereas Jo Harding in “Twister” is on a dangerous mission to embed a special weather device within an F5 tornado, Brown wants to study the past to help the future and has plotted his own personal forecast. He plans on staying at Texas Tech to earn his doctoral degree and eventually working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laboratories in Norman, Oklahoma.

“If we have better forecasts, we can improve the warning times for the public and help save lives,” he said. “If, in 40 years, I can say that I’ve had some role improving the warning time from about 12 minutes now to 30 or 40 minutes, that would be big for me.”