Yeah, that's my ugly mug shot! (looks like I've put on some weight and lost more hair - must be too much good living!) I'm 46 years young (60 is classified middle-age you know!) and have lived in Darwin, Northern Territory for around 7 years to date (2008). I'm married to Nathalie and have a lovely daughter who's 16 going on 30! With a permanent night job you'd never think I find time to do much of anything, but somehow with the days I get off from work twice a week and in between everything else I manage to get out to chase. Some days you can plan to have off to chase and nothing eventuates, but hey, that's all part of the fun of wasting one's time and fuel driving around!
I've always been interested in severe weather from an early age, but honestly I was scared to death of lightning and thunder. I loved watching it from far away, but was petrified to even actually go outside to see it!
My interest was sparked by Cyclone Tracey in 1974 when I was coming back to Adelaide from Melbourne (an eight hour drive) with some fellow who had driven all the way down from ex-Darwin in his Pontiac Firebird with Coke cans holding up the windscreen and the car was just battered to death from the cyclone. There was a family of five, plus mum and the driver all coming back to Adelaide in this car. The looks that people gave us were priceless to say the least!!
From that day on I realised I was missing out on something special. So years later when my family and I moved to Darwin I decided to take a more active interest in severe weather. It has only been the last 2-3 years (2005-2008) that I decided to get serious and read - and still do - websites, articles, books, reports on severe weather both here in Australia and in the USA. Studied radar and satellite images and reading meteorological material to educate myself on storm structure, cloud type, the atmosphere and how they all work together.
I purchased an SLR camera and all the gear and storm chased initially just to get some photos, but two years on have come to appreciate the complexity of these things and just how important they are to the planet! They're so complex in the way they form that chasing them now is even more exciting than before. I generally move around the Darwin area and further rural about a 70km radius or even as far as 500km if the likelihood of big storms is forecast.
I've been fortunate because of my passion and knack for locating storms and lightning that I won the Tourism NT Photographic competition in 2007 which was a great honour! My photos are regularly featured in the Northern Territory News had a 7 page feature on myself chasing storms in Darwin in the GEO Magazine in Europe in 2007. A wonderfuly humbling experience to appreciate that your hard work is noticed overseas by others.
If you want to chase storms I encourage you to do so, but do it safely and not alone. Learn a little about what you're attempting as it can get quite hairy out in the elements and even today close lightning strikes send that 'whoa!' factor within - it's great fun and you can soon have a passion for what I think is pretty damn exciting!
Soon I hope to visit the USA in Oklahoma to chase supercells and tornadoes on the Great Plains, it's every serious chaser's dream and it's the ultimate in storm chasing bar none!