All About Me and My Journey

Welcome back to my home on the web!  After a lengthy hiatus from managing a full website, my mid-life crisis brain decided this was a good alternative to purchasing some random sports car.  If you’re interested in how all this got conjured up, I invite you to look back at my site’s history cause if you’re on this page, you’re here for me!

Currently, I’m a national correspondent, storm chaser, and Meteorologist with the AccuWeather Network where I started in May of 2021.  Prior to AccuWeather, I was the KAKEland Storm Ranger and one of the TV Meteorologists for KAKE-TV in Wichita, Kansas for three years. But my formal TV career started at WSIL-TV in southern Illinois where I was the weekend Meteorologist and the Weather Warrior. While in college in Denver, I was the primary storm chaser for KMGH-TV and also served as a part time weather producer. During his time across those stations, I created and produced several storm chasing series and had a hand in several award-winning severe weather programs.

All throughout that career, I have been an active storm chaser.  It was something I wanted to do since I was a kid.  While technically I am a Twister-era chaser as my ability to learn to drive happened to coincide with that movie’s release, storm chasing was on my radar very early on in life.  On April 26, 1991, an F-5 tornado tore through the Kansas town of Andover.  I remember watching The Weather Channel as that event unfolded and seeing the McConnell Air Force Base video and was just memorized.  I immediately took interest in tornadoes (and all natural disasters).  I remember sitting in my elementary school’s library reading encyclopedias on tornadoes, getting all the Tornado Video Classics VHS tapes, just soaking up tornadoes.  Oddly enough, I had a huge fear of them growing up.  But as I learned about them, that fear turned to something else.  The following year, TWC did a special called “The Enemy Wind”, which introduced me to the concept of storm chasing via Warren Faidley’s piece introing the special.  It was at that point where I said that I wanted to be a storm chaser!

Well, storm chasing is hard if you don’t drive, and at 11-years old, I clearly had an issue.  So my obsession grew with more videos, more books, including ‘Storm Chaser’, the book by Warren Faidley.  When the movie “Twister” came out in 1996, I was first in line to see it.  As a kid, I enjoyed it.  Having NOT chased, I didn’t know any better.  But it definitely further grew my interest.

Later in ’96, I turned 16, and learner’s permit time came.  Still couldn’t up and drive, but I was getting close.  In May of 1997, it was a Wednesday afternoon.  I was on my couch at home when my Mom, who was a work-from-home traffic reporter, alerted me to a tornado report outside Washington Court House.  As she was giving me the details, my Dad walked in from work and immediately asked, “you wanna chase it?”  Off we went, and after a short drive southeast toward the town of Clarksburg, there we were, facing down a small F-1 tornado, my first chase, my first tornado.  I couldn’t believe it, neither could my Dad as we both stood outside the family Pontiac Sunbird.  You can read all about that first chase and see more pictures here.  Needless to say, I was on my way.  I became quite famous at school, making the school paper for the chase.  I sent in the report and pictures to Greg Stumpf, one of the first professional contacts I made.

So there it was, the start of this whole thing.  I would end up moving out west to Colorado in April of 1998, the middle of my Junior year of high school.  I did a few VERY local chase outings after I purchased my first vehicle, a 1990 Dodge Grand Caravan, mostly to shoot lightning in and around Denver.  I hadn’t yet venture outside the metro area for storms, but the lightning photography around the Front Range was amazing, and definitely kept me busy enough to satisfy the whole chasing thing.

After graduating high school, naturally I wanted to go to the University of Oklahoma!  That was the school to go to for Meteorology!  I figured I’d do well there, given how good I was at Math through High School!  In summer of 2000, I moved out of the nest and into a rented room in a house in the Moore area.  I did my first semester down there, struggling mightily to balance school with two jobs.  As it was the off-season, I didn’t get many opportunities to chase, but one evening in October offered me a shot and I caught a glimpse of the Crossroads Mall/Oklahoma City tornado in a power flash as I was doing a live phoner with a local radio station; my second ever tornado.  It was a rare happy moment in what was otherwise a rather disastrous chapter for me.  Among school and financial struggles, a series of mechanical issues with my van just kept sinking me further and further into debt.  I last one whole semester, moving back shortly after New Year’s of 2001, feeling very defeated.

So back in Colorado, I enrolled at Red Rocks Community College, getting some of my core courses out of the way.  Turns out I was NOT as good at Math as my high school self was.  What started for me as Calculus in Oklahoma turned all the way to Pre-Algebra as I found myself starting at the bottom of the rung.  For two years, I worked through my core classes, all the while my chasing started to expand a bit.  In May of 2001, I did my first out of state chase into northwest Texas where I saw a few storms.  I made a couple other trips through Kansas as well, so the chasing had begun to grow outside the borders of Colorado.  In 2002, I decided I wanted to start keeping stats.  Miles were tax write-offs, and I had just started selling some video to local TV stations in Denver.  I still took every opportunity I could get to shoot lightning, as that was my absolute favorite.  Ya know, cause up til then, I had only seen two tornadoes.

That would change in 2003.  After several busted chases, including a lengthy trip to Oklahoma and back, I would venture down to the Texas Panhandle on my first high risk storm chase, and my third tornado came to me near Stratford, Texas.  I documented a satellite tornado of a larger tornado that I captured on film but never acknowledged in person.  Later that night, I caught a tornado near Guymon, Oklahoma.  That chase was my first big success.  The rest of 2003 saw several more chases, including nabbing a couple tornadoes in Nebraska on the historic outbreak day of June 24.  Things were slowly taking off for me.

Then came 2004, my breakout season!  The season started early for me as I abandoned the Severe Storms and Doppler Radar conference in Iowa along with several other chasers to go chase an event in Oklahoma (namely Blake Naftel and Tim Samaras among others).  That chase saw three tornadoes on that event.  But more was to come!  2004 was the first year I took extended time off to chase.  I was working between Pizza Hut and on campus in the computer labs, but I would earmark the two weeks after the Spring semester ended as my chase vacation, or May-A-Thon as I liked to call it.  Well, May-a-Thon 2004 was a buffet of tornadoes, namely the May 12 and May 29 events in Kansas.  Both days saw incredible tornadoes, including my first ever nationally televised tornado off the sequence near Conway Springs on the 29th.  But even more special for me, on my the final tornado of the May 12 event, I pulled off to watch it in the darkness, and was there along side Warren Faidley himself, the man who introduced me to all of this, and I was standing next to him watching the Anthony F-4 at the tail-end of the event.  Full-circle moment there for me.

My annual May-a-Thon continued for the next couple seasons, although I sprinkled in a lot of chases, mostly Colorado-based, during the times around that as I continued to struggle my way through Meteorology school.  By this point, I had transferred over to Metropolitan State College (what it was called then) and had picked up a second major in Technical Communications so I could work on something while I was struggling through the math and physics required for the Met degree.  As I was going through classes, I would meet Ed Grubb, who was a chaser himself, and was taking some courses at the school.  We got introduced through one of my professors, Anythony Rockwood, and we started chasing occasionally together.  Classes were rough for me, but despite the struggles, having to take some classes two and three times over, and the advice of my professors to drop the major for a minor, I kept fighting through because I wanted to be a legit Meteorologist.  

But before that would happen, on March 19, 2007, I got an email from Tim Samaras..

“I wanted to throw something at you, but first, I’ll ‘bait’ you.  How does free chasing sound to you this week?“

It was my first invitation to chase with Tim… AND I TURNED HIM DOWN!  Okay, not cause I didn’t want to (my God did I ever), but because I had arranged that particular chase trip with several folks who were going to be coming along with me (among those folks, Jennifer Brindley).  But I told him (just short of begging, mind you) to keep me in mind for another time.  Fortunately, he did.  We went back and forth on that email thread for a couple of days before we both opted to bag the trip as the event was looking worse and worse as time went on.  I remember how relieved I was the trip fell through, cause I was like “did I literally say no to this man”.  But no matter, he insisted on a future invite, one that would come the following month…

 

Tim and I had met numerous times in the past, I actually attended the first ever “Chaser Con” at his house where I met several people whom I’d make life-long friendships with.  I was often in Tim’s vision as I attended the subsequent Chaser Cons and would often chat him up during those.  Of course, our first “unofficial chase” together was in March of 2004, even as we were in separate vehicles.  But after my girlfriend and I (now wife) moved to a now apartment in Lakewood, we were literally down the street from Tim.

Perks of living down the street from the guy, makes for easy coordination.  And I would finally get out with him that April, even being part of a probe deployment on a couple whimpy nadoes in Kansas.  We chased together quite a few times through the season, me seeing several tornadoes with him on that stretch, on what were very informal chases that occasionally saw some probe deployments as the situations presented themselves.

The 2008 season was built on high anticipation.  Tim and I had been chatting about the plans for the coming season, including a more formal operation and he wanted me to be a big part of it.  Thus came TWISTEX, and the start of a four-year operation I was honored to be such a huge part of.  I lasso’d my relatively new chase partner and now good friend, Ed in on the action and he and were in tow for a lot of amazing chases.  In four years with the operation, we documented over a hundred tornadoes, deploying on may of them.  Our first season was with National Geographic, but in 2009, we joined the Discovery Channel hit TV series, “Storm Chasers”, where we did three full seasons with the show.  That was a wild ride, for sure, but a fun one!

But even, bigger, more exciting news to share!  In May of 2009, I FINALLY became METEOROLOGIST Tony Laubach.  After nine years (no kidding, NINE), I finally completed all the coursework to satisfactory grades and walked with my degree in hand!  I technically ‘walked’ the previous December as I did not want to have family and friends in town during chase season (haha, that was a legit thing).  Which worked out well for me; everyone came out in December to celebrate with me, all the while I was hoping I wasn’t gonna screw up my final semester.  Fortunately, I finished in May (whether it be by my own work or the school just trying to get me the heck out).  The day of my final, I turned it in and met my storm chase partner, Ed Grubb, in the parking lot of the Science Building on campus and we drove out to Missouri to chase the Kirksville tornado the very next day.  My first official tornado as a Meteorologist.

After the end of Discovery, my time with TWISTEX had come to a unofficial close.  While I occasionally chased with Tim and company, it was much more informal.  Out of school, I went back into pizza, and worked part-time Denver 7 with Chief Meteorologist Mike Nelson.  In late 2012, my wife took a full ride to Southern Illinois University, and we moved out of Colorado to settle there.

Then came El Reno… the chase that changed everything.  We all know what happened on that day.  It was devastating.  I spent a couple weeks back in Colorado immediately after as myself and my storm chasing friends all tried to come to terms over what happened.  When I went back to Illinois, I applied for a graduate program at SIU and was also offered a full ride.  Over the summer, I took a job as the Weather Warrior for WSIL, and started my formal TV career there.  We both finished our degrees, but decided to stay there for a bit.  Southern Illinois was amazing, and we both loved our jobs there.  I was growing in my career, even starting my own news series, “Weather Warrior Wednesday”, that allowed me eight weeks of chasing.

In August of 2016, I filled in for six weeks as a Broadcast Meteorologist, my first time in front of the green screen.  I said “let me wear Snoopy ties and keep the goatee” and I’ll be your fill-in dude.  And they let me.  I made my weatherman debut on August 8, and I wasn’t nervous in the slightest (a lie, but you’d never know watching it).  I did pretty good for those six weeks and it earned me a few opportunities here and there to fill in.  Well, I kinda enjoyed it, and it lead me to eventually taking the full-time weekend weatherman role there when the position opened up the following year.

A couple years went by and I saw an opening for a weekend weatherperson job in Wichita.  I applied, and would get that job with KAKE-TV.  We would move to Wichita in 2018 where we stayed for three years.  I did a busy mix of weathermanning and storm chasing, covering the entire Wichita DMA which was basically the western two-thirds of Kansas.  It made for some very long days.  But it was great experience, and it all lead to where I am today.

In 2021, I decided to leave KAKE, and hunted for my next opportunity.  We looked at several areas for our next destination, but as the fates would have it, our road would lead us back to the state we left nearly a decade earlier.  I took a job with the AccuWeather TV Network as a National Correspondent, and we would return to Colorado in May of 2021.  To prove how pre-destined this was, on the day we closed on our house in northern Colorado, 90 minutes after getting the keys, this happened…

And that leads us to now… several years into our second Colorado stint, and me still chasing storms, but now have expanded to hurricanes and other crazy stuff I had not experienced til this job.

It’s been a ride, that’s for sure.  Some incredible highs, some devastating lows.  But all lead us to present day.  I wouldn’t change anything about it.  It’s been amazing having been able to experience all I have.  See what I’ve seen, and do so with some of the most amazing people I know.  When I was a kid, I said I wanted to be a storm chaser.  Thirty-some-odd years later, I can go back and tell that kid, “hey, you’re gonna be a storm chaser.”