Jonathan Finch, tornado man

Jonathan Finch likes dramatic weather. He draws his paycheck from the National Weather Service, for whom he works as a meteorologist. But he also devotes hours of free time to forecasting and researching tornadoes in Bangladesh and eastern India, and he often spends a chunk of his vacation time chasing storms in the Midwest.

“Yeah, I’m pretty much tied up in the weather stuff,” he said. “That’s a big percentage of what I do.”

Since he was in grade school in Lawrenceville, Va., Finch (Environmental Sciences ’91) has been fascinated with the weather. His fascination led him to the University of Oklahoma — tornado country — for graduate school and to his current home in Dodge City, Kan., where violent storms are also common. It also drew his attention to Bangladesh and east India, where in 1996 a storm of tornadoes killed hundreds of people.

“That kind of got me curious about it,” he said. “I started looking into the meteorological conditions that led to tornadoes over in that region. The more I looked at it, the more interested I was in it.”

Finch, 35, learned how to put together a basic Web site and began using readily available atmospheric data to post forecasts and warnings at www.bangladeshtornadoes.org during the spring tornado season. The site, now in its second year, also includes loads of historical data and enough complicated, detailed information to satisfy almost any curious onlooker.

Finch doesn’t expect his site is having much direct impact in Bangladesh, an extremely poor country about the size of Iowa, but he said he has gotten positive feedback from fellow meteorologists around the world. The region is one of only a few — including the U.S., Canada and South Africa — that experiences the specific atmospheric conditions that create tornadoes, but Finch said it has drawn relatively little attention.

“This is a brand-new area that’s ripe for research, and it’s fun to do something nobody’s really done before,” he said.

Closer to home, Finch has been chasing storms in the Midwest for 11 years. He estimates he’s seen about 100 tornadic thunderstorms up close — which means anywhere from one mile to a dozen miles away. By now he knows how to stay safe, but he had one early experience that didn’t go as smoothly.

“I was on the wrong side of the storm,” he said. “I was east of the updraft, east of the storm. And there’s where you don’t want to be a lot of times, because that’s where your real large hail falls out. I had my windshield broken with hail, so I definitely didn’t want to do that again. Every time you go out to chase, you learn more and more. So now, I feel fairly comfortable. I know where I need to be, where I don’t need to be. I try to stay out of dangerous situations.”

And if all else fails?

“If you do get in front of it, just make sure you have a good car that’s not going to break down.”