WKU News

Eight WKU students participated in the 2022 Storm Chase class.

It’s been a busy few weeks for University Meteorologist Josh Durkee.

Before leading a group of WKU students to provide weather and emergency management support this month at the Special Olympics USA Games in Orlando, Florida, Dr. Durkee led another group of students on the 13^th annual WKU Storm Chase class across the Great Plains in May.

The 2022 class “was the most unusual year,” Dr. Durkee said.

How unusual?

“We did not see a single tornado,” said Dr. Durkee, Meteorology Professor and Director of White Squirrel Weather. “The first thing people ask is how many tornadoes did you see. But the point of the class is to teach students how to forecast severe weather and document severe weather outcomes. Even though we didn’t see any tornadoes this year, we saw plenty of severe weather.”

The two-week Field Methods in Weather Analysis and Forecasting course traditionally documents storms in the Great Plains, but this spring’s weather patterns prompted Dr. Durkee and eight WKU students to follow storms into Minnesota and Wisconsin.

“This was the first year we did not make it into Texas, which is unusual,” he said. “Texas usually is the first state we visit.”

Despite the challenges of an unusual year, the goals for the class were easily met, Dr. Durkee said.

Highlights of severe weather encountered and documented during the May 7-20 trip included a derecho with 90 mph winds in South Dakota, 1-inch to 2-inch hail on multiple occasions, flash flooding, wind damage and power outages. The 2022 trip covered 6,217 miles. In 13 years, the WKU Storm Chase class has traveled 97,994 miles (3.9 trips around the equator), for an annual average of 7,070 miles.

“The experience was positive,” he said. “The students had a full plate of forecasting severe storms and doing it in unique places. Forecasting and tracking storms in Minnesota and Wisconsin is not the same as the open areas of the Great Plains. But the students did well with their forecasts.”

Students participating in the trip were: Casey Archey of Almo; John Bowen of Louisville; Cassie Campbell of Marissa, Illinois; Kohen Hernandez of Fort Worth, Texas; Autumn Kahafer of Brandenburg; Michael Quire of Elizabethtown; Mason Quiram of LaGrange; and Sylvia Stinnett of Westview.

Storm Chase virtual course

Like other programs, the WKU Storm Chase class has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in the past two years.

“The pandemic taught me to rethink the way we offer this class,” Dr. Durkee said. “During the pandemic we created a virtual component of the class and tested it. We started running it in tandem with our Emergency Management Disaster Science program. The result is you get unique experiences for two different classes.”

A paper on the course’s first virtual component in 2020, Field and Stream: Initial Testing of a Live-Streamed, Storm-Chase Course in Meteorology, was published this month in The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

“The pandemic taught us a different way to deliver a field course to people who can’t physically attend,” Dr. Durkee said.

While meteorology students are in the field to learn more about forecasting and analyzing severe weather, the EMDS students use the virtual course to learn more about how weather forecasts and changing conditions impact events and communities.

“For the emergency management group, I take one of our more prolific weather days on the chase and incorporate that into a simulated event,” Dr. Durkee said. “The EM group has to create an emergency action plan for the simulated event.”

Then Dr. Durkee injects real, documented severe weather data from the field component to challenge the students how to mitigate and respond to severe weather emergencies unfolding during the event. “Ultimately, we have created an innovative, dynamic capstone learning experience for all students studying Meteorology and Emergency Management Disaster Science,” he said.

Contact: Josh Durkee, joshua.durkee@wku.edu

-WKU-

Western Kentucky University prides itself on positioning its students, faculty and staff for long term success. As a student-centered, applied research university, WKU helps students expand on classroom learning by integrating education with real-world applications in the communities we serve. Our hilltop campus is located in Bowling Green, Kentucky, which was recently named by Reader’s Digest as one of the nicest towns in America, just an hour’s drive from Nashville, Tennessee.