Stormgasm.com has been online since 2001, and it looks like it. I mean that as the highest compliment. This is a storm chasing website built by Jim Bishop, Simon Brewer, and their rotating crew of fellow chasers, and it's packed to the rafters with tornado footage, supercell photography, and detailed chase reports spanning from 1999 to 2014. The layout is pure early-web: simple HTML pages, bold text headers, copyright notices at the bottom of every page, and the kind of navigation structure where you just keep clicking deeper and deeper into the archive.
The first thing that grabbed me was the Video Gallery. It's basically a chronological catalog of tornado intercepts, each one described with the kind of breathless specificity that only comes from someone who was actually there. The entry for the May 31, 2013 El Reno tornado, for example, notes that it grew to 2.6 miles wide, setting a record for the widest tornado in history. Jim Bishop and Jesse Duncan shot footage from "very close range on I-40 just east of El Reno." Then there's a separate entry for the dash cam footage where a satellite tornado crosses I-40 as they're trying to drive away. You can feel the adrenaline just reading the descriptions.
But it's the older stuff that really pulled me in. There are multiple videos from June 24, 2003, when Jim Bishop and Reed Timmer chased the infamous Manchester, South Dakota tornado. The description casually mentions Jim putting the car in reverse while Reed screams "back up!" as a tornado crosses the road "only a matter of yards" in front of them. That day turned out to be the biggest tornado outbreak in South Dakota history, and they were right in the middle of it.
The Storm Chases page is organized by year, going all the way back to 1999. Clicking through the years is like scrolling through someone's life. You can see the team grow, the equipment improve, the chases get more ambitious. By 2006 and 2007 they're shooting in HD, which they proudly note on the Stock Footage page next to every clip.
Speaking of that stock footage page, it's a goldmine of specific, almost obsessive detail. Each clip gets a full paragraph explaining where it was shot, what happened, and what you're about to see. The entry for the May 22 Wilber, Nebraska chase begins with: "This video has never been seen on television. Watch these chasers take cover for their lives as a tornado is bearing down on them." You can download low quality sample clips, some just a couple megabytes. It's charming in a way that a modern stock footage platform could never be.
The Coleridge, Nebraska chase write-up from June 17, 2014 is probably the most detailed single page on the site. Juston Drake and Simon Brewer documented several violent tornadoes, and the write-up goes deep into the meteorology, the chase strategy, and then the damage survey they conducted three days later. They compare the ground scouring to the Jarrell, TX tornado of 1997 and argue the damage could justify an EF5 rating. It reads like a field report written by people who genuinely understand what they're looking at.
The About page lists the full chase team with photos and bios. There are honorary members, original members, and a whole section about their media appearances on ABC News, CNN, BBC, The Weather Channel, and more. Two of the team members even had a show called "Storm Riders" on The Weather Channel, produced by NBC Peacock Productions. But the core of it all is still this handmade website, built by Jim Bishop in 2001, originally just so the crew could share their pictures with the world.
The Photo Gallery sorts everything into categories: tornadoes, hurricanes, supercells, hail, wall clouds, lightning, rainbows, mammatus, sunrises and sunsets, nature, clouds, winter weather. It's a whole taxonomy of atmospheric phenomena organized by people who've spent their lives watching the sky.
Go click around Stormgasm. Lose yourself in the stock footage descriptions. Read the Coleridge chase report. Watch some early-2000s tornado footage shot from way too close. This is what the web was made for: people with an obsession and a willingness to build something by hand to share it with strangers.