She chased a storm out of the classroom and across the Great Plains.

Junior Kristin Lucero remembers her first storm. She’s 4 and lying in her mother’s lap. From the couch she feels a stormy spring breeze gliding through the open screen door.
“It’s thundering and lightning outside, and it sounds terrible,” she says. “At that moment, I couldn’t stop staring at it. I was just in awe, and it’s been like that ever since.”

Lucero’s passion for storms led her to pursue meteorology in college and, this summer, to join a program chasing severe storms across the Great Plains. For two and a half weeks, Lucero and nine others worked with Ball State University professors to study and track severe weather.
After a briefing around 9 a.m., Lucero would hop in a van and head out to find a storm. The team would chase until 10 or 11 p.m., and sometimes drove more than 700 miles in one day.

“At first, we started to chase little storms just to get practice,” Lucero says. “About halfway through and near the end, we started to see a lot more stuff. We were able to see a textbook example of the way a storm works, the way it gets fed.”

Lucero witnessed meteorological magic: wall clouds, funnel clouds, lightning shows, mesocyclones (a step in the formation of tornadoes) and a tornado look-a-like called a gustnado. But the holy grail of weather — a tornado — seemed just out of reach.
“We were driving and it was dusk — no one was talking and we were all just leaning against the windows — and I remember looking out and in the sky I could see way off in the distance this cloud that was in the shape of a tornado. It was low and hanging in the sky like the perfect shape of a tornado,” Lucero says. “To me it was just frustrating in a sense, because it’s like, OK, God, stop tinkering with me. It was only there for the time we all looked out. Then it was gone.”

Lucero never saw her tornado, but she left with an improved set of forecasting skills. Hopefully, she says, this won’t be her last experience driving into a storm.
“I always tell my friends that in the movie ‘Twister,’ at the end when Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt’s characters are hanging out and flying, I’m like, if I could do that safely, it would be awesome,” she says.

For now, however, it’s back to watching the clouds out of her car window.
“I just love weather,” Lucero says. “I know that sounds so nerdy and so cheesy. But even on a beautiful day, I’m just in awe about the way things work in the sky.”