As New York becomes more prone to severe weather, the city's community of weather enthusiasts has plenty to document. claramcmichael reports
Nicholas Isabella, Mariya Isabella, Scott McPartland, and John Huntington are part of New York City’s small community of storm chasers. Photo: Victor Llorente As tornadoes go, it wasn’t much: more of a vague black mass than a funnel cloud crossing a suburban New Jersey road. But Mariya Isabella had been waiting for years to capture one on camera, and she and her husband Nicholas raced the last mile to film it, using radar as their guide.
Most storm chasers operate in Tornado Alley, the swath of the Midwest where tornadoes are almost a tourist attraction. Not surprisingly, the region is saturated with young, thirsty chasers trying to top each other’s tornado counts. New York City doesn’t have the drama of the Great Plains’ tornadoes or the South’s hurricanes, but it has always been good for the occasional nor’easter or summer thunderstorm. The city’s storm chasers usually get their biggest thrills chasing larger storms elsewhere.
As the storms have gotten more intense, the demand for storm-chasing footage and even the personal profiles of the ones doing the chasing has gone up. Few have seized on this shift toward the city more than Nicholas Isabella. For Nicholas, being in the city during Superstorm Sandy in 2012 was a pivotal moment for him.
The competition he faces from everyone with a cell phone makes it harder to sell footage. But because it’s New York, the networks are still quick to buy videos of weather events, even if they’re not that dramatic or aren’t actually of a storm at all. As extreme weather hits New York more frequently, storm chasers aren’t just shooting the storms; they’re often alerting authorities to dangerous conditions and providing raw data to researchers. During Tropical Storm Ida, John Huntington, a 57-year-old storm chaser from Brooklyn, was driving near the Brooklyn Army Terminal when he ran into flash flooding. He called 911, but couldn’t get through.