Lightning strikes seen from the window of a storm chaser: best photo by Hank Shima | Art and design

TThere’s a lot of luck when you’re chasing monsoon storms in Arizona during July or August. This was taken on a very frustrating day where I kept missing everything. When I thought it was all over, I called her out for the night. I was taking a shower when I heard a roaring sound and ran to the window. I was washing the sand out of my teeth and ears, after being in the windy desert all day, and I didn’t want to go back out, so I thought, “I’ll just take a picture from my hotel room.”

I imagine myself as an artist but Mother Nature does all the work. If there’s a tornado on a flat horizon, how do you make that artistic? It’s something I constantly struggle with. Maybe she picks flowers as she leans into it. But in the end you just have to say: “Click, I get it.” So any time I can do something different, like this, it’s rewarding.

The type of thunderstorms that were occurring that day are called pulsating storms, which appear to rise and fall randomly in a cycle lasting about 30 minutes. One will pop up and you’ll drive, but by the time you get there it’s dead, and then one will pop up over where you just left. It’s like Whac-a-Mole.

When you have big open skies, you can see distant storms, but I also use radar because you may have mountains or other clouds blocking your view, and those type of storms are chaotic and disorganized. Chasing tornadoes is different. These conditions last for hours, and you can sometimes predict promising conditions four or five days in advance.

I’ve been obsessed with storms for as long as I can remember. When I was four years old, I used to draw hurricanes and look them up in library books. I think it’s because I liked the monsters: Godzilla, the Loch Ness Monster, and UFOs. I grew up in Texas where we did tornado drills in school, but never Godzilla or UFO drills, so tornadoes to me were probably the only monsters that really existed.

Most people don’t want to see a tornado. Chasing them disrupted school or family reunions, because I always felt this ridiculous desire to storm. I’m happy when I’m around them. It’s not about the adrenaline, which makes me feel shaky and uncomfortable. It’s about beauty. But I have had horrific near-death experiences. And every time it happens, I say to myself, “I never want to feel this again.” When you pull away quickly because of a stupid mistake, and you think that the car could be in the air at any moment and you probably won’t survive, that feeling is terrible – and I’ve felt it many times.

The last time was in 2023, when hubris got the best of me and I drove my car near a stupidly ugly, rain-covered tornado in Nebraska. Earlier, I missed a beautiful white tornado in the middle of nowhere – all my friends and competitors were there, but I was an hour late because we were driving from Texas. I went into catch-up mode. There was another storm, a rain tornado, so you couldn’t see him. I drove in the rain, risking my life. These rain-covered tornadoes are so ugly and hard to see that they do almost nothing on social media. They are not photogenic. Maybe 50 friends will say, “Damn, dude, you’re brave,” and then forget about it.

My friends and I debriefed after storms, and in that debriefing I realized: “Wow, I’m more susceptible to ego, arrogance, and competition than I thought.” Understanding that about myself during dangerously tempting moments helped me think, “Back off, man, live to fight another day.”

My favorite storm ever? There is a type called a periodic supercell. It’s like a relay racer who hands the baton to the next person who then hands it to the next person. These storms do that with hurricanes, and you can have multiple tornadoes on the ground as they deliver energy to the next updraft. All the old chasers talked about those legendary days when a circular giant cell traveled over an open area and there were 10 or 12 light tornadoes throughout the day. I always missed it until finally, on May 24, 2016, I had a supercell over open country, very beautiful, well-lit tornadoes, two, sometimes three for most of the event. He didn’t kill anyone.

The Storm: Chasing Nature’s Wildest Weather by Hank Shima Published October 28 (DK Travel)

Biography of Hank Shima

child: Houston, Texas, Year of the Rat
Trainers: Self-taught
Effects: “Jim Morrison, Stanley Kubrick and Mother Nature.”
High point: “The discovery of a new transient luminous event that coined the green ghost.”
Low point: “I can’t think of one. It’s been a non-stop adventure. However, I had bad sushi last night that tasted like rice and mayonnaise.”
Top tip: “Aim for what you like, not what you think others will like.”