HURRICANE UPDATE
We are currently closely monitoring the progress of Hurricane Ike. Please scroll to the bottom of the page and read our Hurricane Ike updates!!!
America's Best Storm Chasing Tours!
Violent Skies Tours is more than just your ordinary storm chasing tour company, it's the home of the best storm chasing team in the world! Our team of storm chasers and professional meteorologist is led by Tour Director Brian Barnes to get you into the best locations for viewing severe storms and tornadoes safely. You'll see our team working together to forecast our targeted areas for the best chances of severe weather, you'll ride along with them as we travel hundreds of miles across the Great Plains to intercept nature's most destructive force, tornadoes! You've seen us on The Weather Channel, CNN, Fox News, and many other networks, now you can be a part of the action. And, it all happens in our storm chasing vans that are customized with luxury features such as captain seating and in-motion satellite television. Our customer's satisfaction is our mission, storm chasing is our passion! Signup for a tour today and let us treat you to the Ultimate Storm Chasing Experience!™
Special Low Price for 5 Seats!
We have five seats on Tour 5 in 2009 available for the unbelievable low price of only $1700.00 (normal price is $2200.00) for a total cost savings to you of $500.00! This is due to a group who booked these seats and after paying their deposits they learned of an illness of one of their group's members. They have asked us to resale the seats and to apply their deposits to YOUR TOTAL COST! Once these 5 seats are sold, we won't be offering anymore seats at this rate. However, these seats must be paid-in-full at the time of your reservation.
UPDATE: There are only 4 seats left at this low price. Book Now - First come, first serve!
VST Welcomes The Weather Channel
The Weather Channel's own Jeff Mielcarz and "Road Crew" traveled with Violent Skies Tours in early May while storm chasing in southcentral Oklahoma. Many thanks to Jeff and his team for putting up with us during their time while storm chasing this year and we look forward to many more chases between our Road Crew and thiers!
View the video from The Weather Channel here:
VST Welcomes The BBC
During our 2008 storm chasing tours, Lead Storm Chaser Brian Barnes and our team had the sincere pleasure to host The BBC in Tornado Alley! During our adventures with The BBC on-board, we intercepted numerous severe and tornado warned supercells, including the tornadoes the occurred on the afternoon of May 29 that hit Kearney, Nebraska. For more information, visit The BBC's website at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7426385.stm
As a side note, we'd like to extend our condolences to our friend & customer "Nicole", whose mother sustained damage to her home in Kearney, NE on May 29, 2008. It's been a rough year for many people who live in Tornado Alley, including our own Tour Director's uncle, who also sustained tornado damage to his home this year at his rural residence west of Pryor, OK. Thankfully our friends and family are all okay and were not physically injured during their very scary events, but not everyone was as fortunate. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to all.
Major Update Forthcoming
We've been so busy with the storm chasing season that we've not had time to get photos, videos and chaselogs from the field to the website. Our apologies to all those who enjoy reading our chaselogs. With the spring tornado season wrapping up, we're going to be working on updating the chase logs with photos and video from the 2008 storm chasing tours. And, we'd like to thank all our customers for helping us making this year one of our best ever.
Violent Skies Tours & Thunderbolt Tours Announce Strategic Partnership
It is our sincere pleasure to announce the partnership between Violent Skies Tours and Australian Thunderbolt Tours.
Thunderbolt Tours was established in 2002 and is the only Australian Storm Chasing Tour company to offer tours in Australia and Tornado Alley. Thunderbolt Tours' operators Jimmy Deguara and David Croan have been storm chasing since the early 1990s and are excited to join forces with Brian Barnes and the team at Violent Skies Tours.
The combined storm chasing and operating experience across two continents will provide our clients a truly unique and entertaining storm chasing expeditions that our industry has never seen before. This is truly a first of its kind partnership in the storm chasing tourism industry that combines the experience and mastery of two outstanding storm chasing teams and furthers our effort of offering The Ultimate Storm Chasing Experience™.
Special: Volumetric Radar Images of "Georgia Dome" Atlanta, Georgia Storm
A few hours ago (at the time of this writing) the Georgia Dome in Atlanta was hosting the Southeastern Conference Basketball Tournament between Alabama and Mississippi State when a storm ripped a hole into the roof of the 16-year-old building and sent fans fleeing for safety. We were tracking this storm on radar from our forecasting lab and have provided a 3D volumetric image of the storm taken just shortly after it hit the stadium. This image also provides an example of just one of the tools that we use during our storm chasing tours to help us develop successful and timely interception strategies while chasing.
April 2009 Update - 2009 Schedule Published
Our 2009 Storm Chasing Tour Schedule is now published and reservations are being accepted. We made a few exciting changes to the tour schedule and put a new spin (pun intended) on a few of our speciality tours.
QuickFlight™ Storm Chasing Tours
QuickFlight Status: Monitoring Hurricane IkeLast Update: September 6, 2008 - 2:32 PM CDT
With Tropical Storm Hannah moving inland on the east coast -- ALL focus now shifts to Hurricane Ike which is currently spinning its way towards Grand Turk as a major Category 3 Hurricane.
The question remains -- where will Ike impact the United States? The track models are beginning to agree with one another, refer to this image provided courtesy of Weather Underground:
The model that we are paying the closest attention to is the GFDL. This model has proven to be most accurate in regards to long-term track forecast with Hurricane Dolly and Hurricane Gustav this year. Since it's done so well with those storms in recent history, we assume that there is a 90% probability that the GFDL model is also going to get this one right as well.
Here is an animation showing the GFDL's forecasted track for Hurricane Ike in more detail:
We can't entirely agree with what the GFDL is currently forecasting in its latest model run. But we do expect that Ike will make a brush with Cuba, although its hard to tell how long it would be over land or which part of Cuba it will do business with, or what we can expect in intensity once it emerges from Cuba -- but Ike will emerge into the Gulf of Mexico. The big question from there is, where will it make landfall?
At this point and time just about any location along the Gulf Coast is under threat from Hurricane Ike. However, the GFDL has been consistently bringing this storm into Florida somewhere between the Florida Panhandle to Tampa Bay, thus we believe this is the most likely situation.
That being said, we have not ruled out even the possibility of a Texas landfall just yet. It just far too early to make that call. When Ike is 60-72 hours from a US landfall (other than the Florida Keys), we'll start narrowing in on the location that Ike will land as well as having a better idea of its forecasted intensity. Its very possible that a Cuban landfall will not be nice to Ike and could destroy the storm and it might not recover well before impacting the Gulf Coast.
We have already started notifying members of our QuickFlight Hurricane Interception List of a possible interception of Ike. If you have signed up to receive these emails, and we have somehow overlooked your email address please accept our apologies and let us know ASAP and we'll include you in the next email. In order for an interception to happen, we must feel that Ike will be a major hurricane (category 3 or above) at the time of its landfall along the Gulf Coast.
Please keep in-mind, that this is a long range forecast and the forecast will certainly change several times before Ike even gets to the Gulf of Mexico and this should not be used for life-saving information -- please refer to the official forecast from the National Hurricane Center for official forecast information.
For more information on our hurricane interception tours, please email Brian at brian@violentskiestours.net.
