Long before livestreams and viral eyewall videos, a few observers deliberately entered hurricane paths to measure and record them. Their story spans exploration, science, photography, portable technology—and people such as Jim Leonard, who spent decades documenting powerful tropical cyclones.
This history principally traces deliberate, ground-based travel to intercept a tropical cyclone. The chaser selects a landfall target, travels into the forecast path, chooses a survivable position and documents the storm at ground level.
Self-directed travel toward a forecast landfall, followed by observation from a sheltered ground position. Film, photographs, pressure readings and eyewitness logs are typical records.
Mission-assigned crews sample the cyclone over water and aloft, locate its center, measure winds and pressure, and transmit operational data to forecasters.
An institution deploys calibrated instruments and trained teams under a research plan. Some independent chasers later contributed observations to these scientific records.
Trained spotters report local conditions through public-safety networks; news crews and residents document impacts for other purposes. The activity becomes chasing when the observer deliberately travels toward the storm.
Spotting and chasing are not synonyms. A National Weather Service spotter is a trained observer who reports hazardous local conditions to a forecast office or public-safety network. A spotter may remain at home, work from a fixed post or travel locally; the defining act is the report, not pursuit. A chaser deliberately changes location to intercept weather. One person can do both, but a chase does not become an official NWS mission merely because the chaser submits a useful report.
NHC aircraft reconnaissance is operational fieldwork. Military and NOAA crews fly assigned patterns over water, locate the center, measure pressure and winds, and release instrument packages called dropsondes. Their observations are transmitted for forecasts and warnings. The flights are planned, crewed and governed as agency missions; they are not recreational pursuits and they are distinct from a civilian ground interception.
National Weather Service: spotting and chasing safety National Hurricane Center: aircraft reconnaissance
These six recordings trace the changing visual record of hurricanes: early motion-picture aftermath, television reporting, regional archives and independent chasers recording an eye, eyewall and storm surge at close range.
The Edison company dispatched photographers by special train. This surviving film was made shortly after the cyclone and records workers searching the wreckage on Broadway. It is not a chase, but it belongs at the beginning of the visual record of camera crews entering hurricane disaster zones.
Story of a Hurricane preserves television footage made around Carla's Texas landfall, including high winds, rising tides and heavy rain. It documents a professional news assignment rather than an independent recreational pursuit.
Florida Memory has digitized WFSU-TV's silent color reel from Panama City. It combines preparations and damage with some footage made during the hurricane, preserving a regional record outside the better-known national news archives.
A federal post-storm study called Leonard's videotape “remarkable.” From a multistory condominium he recorded damaging wind, rain, the chaotic sea and the eye passage while taking a digital pressure reading—an unusually valuable visual and meteorological record from a major hurricane.
Edds' firsthand account describes buying a last-minute ticket, filming the Category 3 strike and sending video to CNN through a working dial-up connection. It captures the transitional moment when a lone field cameraman could transmit from an isolated landfall before mobile broadband and livestreaming.
Leonard's creator-channel film preserves his view of Charley's compact, rapidly intensifying core. The recording belongs to a wider field record that also supplied handheld pressure observations to the National Hurricane Center's final report.
Here, hurricane chasing means deliberately traveling on land toward a tropical cyclone's center or most intense winds. The movement is usually completed before conditions become impassable; the final phase is an interception from a selected shelter. This combination of forecast, travel, positioning and ground-level documentation distinguishes a chase from simply enduring a storm where one lives.
During the Great Miami Hurricane, Pathé News cameraman Ralph Radnor Earle worked inside the disaster zone and sent his film to New York by airplane. A contemporary motion-picture trade report said the scenes reached Broadway screens on the evening after the storm. The surviving footage and still photographs are the earliest presently identified motion-picture field record associated with a deliberate hurricane assignment.
Earle was a working newsreel cameraman in Miami, not a member of a later self-directed chase community. His record therefore belongs to the history of hurricane documentation without supporting the stronger claim that he invented modern hurricane chasing.
Hurricane reconnaissance developed along a different path. On September 2, 1935, Cuban Army Air Corps pilot Leonard Povey flew from Havana to locate the Labor Day hurricane. He found and circled the storm but did not penetrate it. Four days later, TWA research pilot Tommy Tomlinson passed through the reintensified cyclone at high altitude during a meteorological test. On July 27, 1943, Joseph Duckworth made two well-documented flights through a hurricane center over Texas. Tasked missions followed, and regular military reconnaissance began in 1944.
Reconnaissance crews supply center fixes, wind, pressure and storm structure data to operational forecasters. Independent land chasers instead document the cyclone where it meets communities, roads and structures. The two traditions sometimes observe the same storm, but their routes, instruments and institutional roles are distinct.
The self-directed, automobile-based chase culture is most clearly documented as an American development, aided by a dense road network and by forecasts that made a landfall target reachable. That does not make cyclone observation an American invention. The Philippines, India and Hong Kong built fixed observing and warning systems in the nineteenth century, decades before mobile storm chasing acquired a name. Independent pursuit later appeared in other cyclone basins.
Manila's observatory, India's cyclone-warning service and the Hong Kong Observatory developed instruments, storm signals and public warnings. These were stationary scientific services, not chase expeditions.
New Zealand photographer Geoff Mackley deliberately pursued Pacific cyclones by air and road. A 2001 profile records six such intercepts since 1999, including a Category 5 cyclone in Western Australia. His work is a documented non-U.S. example of independent tropical-cyclone pursuit.
Taiwan's DOTSTAR “typhoon chasing” program represents a third tradition: planned aircraft observations using dropsondes rather than an independent ground chase. National Taiwan University established its Typhoon Research Center in 2009 to connect those targeted observations with modeling, ocean interaction, rainfall research and the training of new typhoon scientists.
Hurricane research aircraft, emerging satellite imagery and an increasingly sophisticated warning system transformed how hurricanes could be located. Meanwhile, weather enthusiasts began deliberately traveling to intercept landfalling storms on the ground. Their equipment was usually modest: paper maps, radio, barometers, still or motion-picture cameras and forecasts obtained through official sources.
Richard Horodner records a deliberate interception of Hurricane Inez in South Florida in 1966 in his own career chronology. He went on to film landfalling hurricanes for decades. A 2000 ABC News profile describes the forecast study, travel, positioning and camera work that made up an independent ground chase before mobile radar and smartphones.
Broadcast reporting supplied a parallel form of deliberate field documentation. During Hurricane Carla in September 1961, KHOU-TV reporter Dan Rather broadcast from Galveston as the storm approached the Texas coast. Boston University's Dan Rather Papers preserve audiovisual and documentary material from that assignment. Rather was reporting rather than pursuing storms as an independent hobby, but the Carla record established an early model for the live, on-location hurricane coverage that later became a recognizable branch of field interception.
A community-researched early-chase chronology identifies another bridge to that record: Florida State University student Terry Nixon joined an independent Hurricane Betsy chase in 1965, then chased Hurricane Inez with Horodner in 1966. Later entries and firsthand recollections place Nixon at Hurricane Kate in 1985, Hurricane Hugo in Puerto Rico in 1989 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Because this chronology combines participant recollection with later research, the archive presents it as a documented lead rather than a settled claim that Nixon was the first amateur hurricane chaser.
In his original biography, Jim described becoming fascinated by severe thunderstorms while growing up around Miami. He recalled Hurricane Donna's passage in 1960 as the defining weather experience of his youth. He wrote that he began tracking every tropical cyclone in the Atlantic basin after Donna. He then named Hurricanes Cleo (1964) and Betsy (1965), which affected the Miami region more directly, as further experiences that deepened his fascination.
Those Miami encounters formed Jim's weather education: tracking storms on paper, watching forecasts evolve and learning the changing character of wind and pressure as a cyclone approached. His overland interception record emerged in the following decade.
Jim's documented field record begins with Hurricane Agnes in June 1972. His recovered storm log places him at Panama City for the June 19 landfall, while his own video channel preserves film of an Agnes-spawned tornado in the Florida Everglades on June 18. The two records show the forecasting, travel and filming that marked the start of his sustained hurricane-interception career.
By the late 1970s Jim was creating a distinctive visual record. A later historical compilation identifies his Hurricane David eyewall footage from Florida in 1979 and attributes a Hurricane Frederic chase in Alabama to Leonard and Richard Horodner.
Jim also chased tornadoes in the Great Plains and pursued western Pacific typhoons, later spending substantial time on Guam. His archive therefore connects Atlantic hurricane interception, western Pacific typhoon work and the wider American storm-chasing community.
As consumer video became more practical, independent storm chasers could return with a moving visual record of eyewall passage, wind damage, waves and changing cloud structures. Jim documented Hurricane Allen in 1980, Gilbert in Mexico in 1988, and Hugo in 1989. A later historical video chronology also attributes a shared Hurricane Diana chase in 1984 to Jim and Richard Horodner. NOAA published multiple Gilbert photographs credited directly to Leonard, while federal research incorporated observations from his encounters with Hugo.
The early community remained small, but a 2015 interview with former National Hurricane Center director Dr. Neil Frank now provides direct evidence of its information-sharing practice. Frank recalls Leonard and other chasers returning to the center, gathering in a conference room, comparing notes and playing field audio recordings. He also remembers worrying about their safety. The recollection captures an informal exchange between independent observers and hurricane specialists before online video made those encounters instantly public.
Television field reporting became a distinct branch of hurricane chasing during the same decade. In 1985, Weather Channel producer Glenn “Hurricane” Schwartz and photographer Steve Angel followed Hurricane Elena for nearly a week while gathering footage for a National Science Foundation-funded documentary. Schwartz's firsthand account records almost 3,000 miles of repositioning, a telephone report from Mobile and sheltering from the eyewall in Pascagoula. In 1988, Liz Jarvis Fabian—then the network's principal field storm reporter—followed Hurricane Gilbert to the Texas coast and participated in The Weather Channel's first live coastal storm report. These assignments mark the transition from footage gathered mainly for later exhibition to reporting delivered from the storm zone itself.
Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and successive Atlantic hurricane landfalls brought intense public attention to hurricane imagery. More portable camcorders, broadcast television and early online networks amplified work that had previously circulated among enthusiasts or appeared in documentary films. Chasers' records revealed localized conditions at human scale, while calibrated instruments, radar and aircraft supplied the measurement framework used in official analysis.
Together, field imagery and formal observing networks created a more complete account: what the cyclone measured like, what it looked and sounded like, and how it interacted with particular buildings, coastlines and communities.
Nick Ravo's March 1992 New York Times profile offers a contemporary snapshot just before Andrew. It presents storm chasing as a small but growing pursuit, connects its expansion to portable video cameras and television demand, and records both safety and disaster etiquette concerns. Jim is the article's opening subject; the profile also documents his 1991 move to Guam.
Mobile internet, GPS, better forecasts and digital cameras made storm interception easier to plan and faster to publish. The catastrophic 2004 and 2005 seasons also drew far more attention to the activity. During Charley's 2004 Florida landfall, Jim recorded a barometric observation of 950.0 mb at Port Charlotte, which the NHC preserved in its official report. This is the clearest example of where the independent chaser's observations entered the historical operational record.
The same technologies also expanded the audience and the number of people seeking to witness hurricanes directly, intensifying concerns about storm surge, debris, emergency access and the visibility of hazardous conduct.
Hurricane chasing grew through parallel contributions: early road interceptions, films and measurements, newsletters and gatherings, operational relationships, and later digital records that could enter scientific analysis.
Earle's 1926 Pathé News assignment preserved the Great Miami Hurricane in motion pictures and moved the film rapidly into national newsreel circulation. His work is an early documentary milestone, distinct from later independent chasing.
Read the contemporary trade account →Povey's locating flight, Tomlinson's 1935 research penetration and Duckworth's 1943 center crossings belong to the separate history of hurricane aviation. Later evidence makes “first flight” a set of distinct claims rather than one settled title.
Explore the flights and original records →The documented early chronology places Nixon on a 1965 Hurricane Betsy chase and both men at Hurricane Inez in 1966. Horodner's firsthand record then traces a career joining field filming, public education and hurricane-video production across five decades.
Read his firsthand chronology →Beginning in the early 1970s, Jim built a multi-decade archive of hurricanes, typhoons and tornadoes. Official publications preserve his photographs, video and portable pressure observations.
Explore Jim's source record →Hoadley's Storm Track newsletter helped turn scattered severe-weather observers into a community. Its 1983 record of Jim Leonard and Barbara White screening film in Norman shows how chase knowledge circulated before the web.
Royal Meteorological Society history →The NHC meteorologists represent the human bridge between forecasting and the early chaser network: informal post-storm gatherings, shared films and a mutual interest in weather imagery.
Richard Pasch's NHC interview →By Hurricane Charley in 2004, a new generation carried portable digital instruments and cameras into landfall. The NHC observer table places their readings beside Jim Leonard's Port Charlotte measurement.
NHC Charley observer table →Global cyclone chasing entered another phase when detailed ground observations could contribute directly to peer-reviewed analysis. Morgerman's Hurricane Patricia record supported a 2017 scientific synthesis of the storm's extraordinary intensification.
NOAA repository: Hurricane Patricia study →The New Zealand photojournalist's late-1990s cyclone work is an early, well-documented example of sustained tropical-cyclone pursuit outside the American chase community.
Read the 2001 profile →Who chased hurricanes—and who chased with Jim? Search the sourced directory of historical and current hurricane chasers, or open the narrower companion record connecting people to particular storms with Jim. Search the directory → · Explore Jim's companion accounts →
Academic teams formalized parts of the practice that independent chasers had developed informally: forecast a landfall, move before roads close, select safe instrument sites and preserve measurements for later analysis. The Florida Coastal Monitoring Program began in 1998, and Texas Tech's StickNet grew from a 2005 student design project into a network used in hurricanes and severe storms.
Other institutions teach storm observation through supervised Great Plains or Gulf Coast courses, connect students to NOAA aviation, or train typhoon researchers through programs such as National Taiwan University’s DOTSTAR. Those pathways share skills with hurricane chasing but are not interchangeable, so the archive catalogs hurricane-specific research separately from tornado-focused classes and clubs.
Hurricane chasing had informal classrooms: shared vehicles, screenings of storm tapes, private gatherings, and extended conversations. Jim Leonard's homes became important venues, but the practice was already visible in the wider storm-chasing community. At gatherings held intermittently in South Florida—documented in the Florida Keys and later in Boynton Beach—chasers screened their storm videos, shared stories, compared equipment, and spent time together over food. These were social occasions, but also an important means by which field experience was circulated across generations before videos could readily be shared online.
A contemporary July 1983 issue of Storm Track places Jim Leonard and Barbara White at a Norman chaser barbecue screening supercell video, demonstrating the social transmission of field experience long before the later South Florida gatherings. Chris Collura photographed the March 28, 2009 gathering in the Florida Keys, including visitors watching chase videos and discussing equipment. HurricaneCity's archive identifies a 13-minute film of the March 20, 2010 gathering. Chris Kridler's contemporary April 2012 account describes Jim hosting chasers in Boynton Beach on March 31, 2012. Collura also documented gatherings in March 2013 and early March 2014, identifying the latter as Jim’s final gathering.
Together, the films, photographs and contemporary accounts show a repeated culture of learning through screenings, equipment talk and shared experience. Visitors with firsthand memories or original photographs may add to this record through the archive.
Livestreaming, mobile radar, drones and instantaneous publishing have made hurricane chasing a highly visible part of modern weather coverage. Professional news crews, scientists, independent observers and online creators now operate with very different objectives—and different standards of risk and evidence.
Jim died in 2014. Some of his original web material subsequently disappeared from its longtime address. Its recovery highlights a neglected part of storm science history: video tapes, images, storm logs and personal websites are themselves historical data, yet they may be less durable than formal government reports. CycloneJim.org preserves both the individual legacy and the broader evolution of the practice.
A WTXL-TV interview recorded in 1986 was shared on YouTube by filmmaker Blake Naftel, who identifies Randy Zipser as the source of the copy. Jim discusses his early chases and his approach to storm documentation.
The interviewer begins asking about Jim Leonard at 10:14; Jim's name is spoken at approximately 10:15.8. Frank recalls chasers returning to the National Hurricane Center to compare notes and play audio captured in storms. The embed starts with the lead-in to that exchange.
Jim belonged to the small first generation of sustained independent hurricane chasers. His distinctive contribution was breadth: decades of Atlantic hurricanes, western Pacific typhoons and Great Plains storms recorded through film, photography and portable measurements. NOAA and NHC publications preserve parts of that field record, while the people he mentored carried his positioning and documentation practices into the digital era. In a firsthand Hurricane Michael account, Doug Kiesling records that advice Jim gave him in 2002—move farther inland into the eye and wait for the surge to recede—guided his decisions during the 2018 storm.
Explore the scientific documentary record → • Kiesling’s firsthand account ↗