With new studio, chase vehicle, Tea Storm Chasers prepares for severe weather season ahead

The soundtrack to Aj Towne’s day is a blur of beeps, rings and tones.

There’s the group message he and a dozen or so members of Tea Storm Chasers use to run their breaking news services.

There’s a barrage of notifications from the organization’s more than 100,000 followers.

There’s the never-ending cacophony of law enforcement calls for service.

And, of course — what started it all — there are the severe weather alerts.

“Everybody in the organization is a volunteer,” said Towne, who founded Tea Storm Chasers as a nonprofit in 2015, after sharing his storm-chasing adventures for about five years prior to that.

Increasingly, though, Tea Storm Chasers is looking more like a maturing nonprofit than a scrappy startup. Towne and the team no longer work from their spare rooms, basements and vehicles but have access to their newly leased office space in a Tea retail center.

Inside, there are multiple studio backdrops, work stations and a training area for the many volunteers who help storm chase.

“The reason we did get the space was more access, to bring more members on and have members be able to have a place to come and hang out,” Towne said. “We have TV here, we have a kitchen, bathrooms.”

And like-minded individuals who love the thrill of a storm chase.

“Everybody likes storms that’s part of this,” Towne said. “We can sit and watch Twister.”

While it’s been a slow start to the spring severe weather season, Towne predicts there will be storms ahead.

“I think we’re going to be looking at an active season,” he said. “I think with the way this winter produced and what we’ve seen in the past, it’s going to be an active season — moisture-filled.”

The Storm Chasers typically work within a 150-mile radius of Sioux Falls. This year, in addition to the new studio and weather graphics package, a new chase vehicle will support the efforts.

The 2009 Chevy Suburban was fully sponsored, with supporters including Big Country Motors, the UPS store of Sioux Falls, Signarama, Royal Tree Service, Bluepeak and In Reach Physical Therapy.

“It will have all the equipment inside it,” Towne said. “We’ve got new cameras and computers and we actually have cell phones dedicated to that vehicle. They’re not ones people carry or personal ones, so that will allow us to come in and have more information going out.”

From the studio, another volunteer can access the live camera in the chase vehicle and stream it during reports.

“So we’ll ultimately have two streams going when severe weather breaks — the chase vehicle live stream and the studio live stream,” Towne said. “We have radio communications that will be able to communicate from anywhere in the United States to our studio.”

When weather isn’t driving their work, Tea Storm Chasers track and report public safety news. The organization uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to cover breaking news.

“We definitely have our share of coverage. I typically listen during the day and in events we have some that will be up and listen a little bit overnight,” Towne said. “Everybody in the organization is a volunteer, so it’s based upon what people have the capability of doing.”

The new studio “is definitely going to allow us to do a lot of expansions on the media side of things,” Towne said.

“We have a news corner to do some media broadcasting, we can bring in guests and change the background. Same thing with in-studio weather. We haven’t had the room or space to do green screen effects.”

An increasing number of advertising sponsors helps support the operational costs of the organization, along with ongoing Krispy Kreme fundraising sales. Tea Storm Chasers itself sponsors Sioux Falls Storm football and has a booth at the games.

“I have people come up to me and say, ‘I follow you guys. You guys are my only source. I don’t have TV. It’s so great what you guys do,'” Towne said. “You could have asked me five years ago do I think we’d be as big as we are today, and my answer would have been no. I never once believed we’d be as big and known as what we are today.”

There’s always a need for more volunteers, he said. Trainings for storm chasers are held monthly, and anyone that wants to help cover other breaking news can be integrated into that team.

“We train in first aid, CPR, search and rescue and how to read a radar, how to look at clouds, what you’re looking at as far as cloud structure and radar structure and things like that. One thing we don’t do is allow members to go out chasing on their own. They have to be part of a team,” Towne said.

“We pay for the equipment, we pay for the training and all we expect out of people is their time and the drive to learn.”

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