From my limited experience as a tour guide, I largely agree with Chuck Doswell’s comments that most guests simply want to see a tornado. How much each customer wishes to learn varies greatly, along with what the individual hopes to get out of the tour. Some just want good photographs or videos, while others are there for the mainly for the experience. My goal as a guide is to attempt to accommodate each customer’s goals as much as possible.

If requested though, I sit down and attempt to explain what I’m looking for in T-P diagrams, radar, etc. With reasonable success I can get them to start figuring some things out on their own. It’s hard though, especially when you’re usually comfortable with people being used mathematical/physical concepts, and suddenly you’re working with people with no to very little math or physics background. I certainly don’t begrudge them though (heck they’re paying me to take them storm chasing), but simply work with them as best I can during the limited time I have. I’d be surprised, and don’t believe that I could take all of what I’ve learned in the course of years and compress into one-two weeks worth of educational lectures, especially when we’re busy with driving, etc. Besides I’d be surprised if many storm chasers themselves even understand weather to the quality you and many others would like (you might even take issue with me having less than 10 years experience J ).

It should be noted though there was a recent study on storm chasing tours by two individuals out of MU. Surprising to me that there was a need for a study, but hey I’ll take what information I can get. The study is not yet published (I believe) but you can find press releases for it on the web. Anyhow, the study found many storm chasing tour customers felt that there was room for improvement in the educational experience they received while on the tour. With that in mind, I will certainly keep attempting to educate my customers as best I can, but only if they want. Perhaps other tours should do the same?

I think that they at least make some rudimentary effort to provide knowledge about what their clientele are seeing. Seems like common sense to me! Surely one can and should learn, in three different seasons, at 2 weeks each, with experienced storm chasers, the difference between a shelf cloud and a wall cloud, which one can see after 10 minutes in a basic spotter training session. I definitely don’t want tours to replace spotting sessions or claim to do so, but just to serve clients’ intellectual needs as well as their desire for adrenaline rushes.

Again, assorted wildlife, Park Service, photography and eco tours I’ve attended seem to make far more effort to educate and inform their clientele, even if it’s not necessarily codified into some mission statement. Why not storm tours too? Does it hurt the bottom line? I don’t see how; if anything, it should help.

Alternatively, maybe those chase tour groups that turned out this curious but abjectly ill-informed chase newbie should state, explicitly and forthrightly, that customers not expect to learn anything. That’s the most honest approach.

“Welcome to MegaWedgeF6 XTREME INSANE Tornado Tours! Treat our tour like a roller coaster, and the atmosphere is an amusement park. You’re along for the ride and the thrills — nothing more, nothing less. If you want to learn something about storms, take a spotter class.“

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However, you still seem to be of the belief that tours are in the education and training business, which they aren’t – unless they choose to take that on (and none have). Just how much education can sink in during a week’s tour, for a client starting at zero? We don’t spend most of the time lecturing, even on my tour. For this year, the 15 guests were split up in 3 different vans, so I could only talk to those in MY van (7 at a time). I have no idea what went on in the other vans, but I suspect the staff members (drivers) in those other vans might have been doing some Q&A – I prefer not to think about what they might have been saying …

I try to explain things as they’re watching what’s going on, as well as the occasional “sit down” lecture, but with rare exceptions (we had such a person on this tour), I believe that most of what I say goes in one ear and out the other. That person had spent considerable time reading about storms on the internet since his last tour and I recommended some elementary meteorology textbooks for him to read before next year. On some tours, I’ve had to explain relatively simple things to certain clients multiple times before they barely BEGIN to grasp what I’m saying. You seem to imply that two or three tours and a guest should be knowledgeable. A few of them DO become ignorant “know-it-alls” after a couple of tours, unfortunately, and begin to provide MISinformation to other guests!

I re-iterate: Tour clients aren’t there to be educated – we’re paid to get them to see storms. Period. It’s not practical to make education a priority on a tour, for many reasons, including (but not limited to) the fact that that’s NOT what the clients are paying us to do!! Only the occasional guest, even on my “lecture tour” actually WANTS to learn more about the meteorology. CoD students on a CoD tour are doing what amounts to a lab exercise in a course – you certainly could have a much higher expectation for them than for the vast majority of tour clients.

Sure, the experience would mean more, as I see it. If we were dealing with at most one or two guests, who had signed up with learning about meteorology as a specific goal, then it would be possible to do more educating. Even in those circumstances, you can’t say much on the fly if the guests are starting with basically zero understanding. How much meteorology did YOU take before things began to make at least some coherent sense? Do you think you could have gotten there in a week? Or 3 weeks, with 51 weeks in between each of the week-long sessions? Understanding meteorology on a fundamental level isn’t easy …

One more point … we had several guest on MY tour this year who basically avoided talking with me for most of the trip. I don’t know ALL the reasons for that, but some of our guests this year were professional or semi-pro photographers and they evidently didn’t want me to explain things to them at all! They wanted storm photos and didn’t want me hovering about distracting them with meteorology lectures. I think the others simply wanted to see storms and found the other vans to be more comfortable for the long drives. I don’t quite understand why they signed up for MY tour in particular, unless it just happened to be at a time of year when they could go on such a trip.