America's Best Storm Chasing Tours!
Violent Skies Tours is more than just your ordinary storm chasing tour company, it's the home of the best storm chasing team in the world! Our team of storm chasers and professional meteorologist will get you into the best locations for viewing severe storms and tornadoes safely. You'll see our team working together to forecast our targeted areas for the best chances of severe weather, you'll ride along with them as we travel hundreds of miles across the Great Plains to intercept nature's most destructive force, tornadoes! You've seen us on The Weather Channel, CNN, Fox News, and many other networks, now you can be a part of the action. And, it all happens in our storm chasing vans that are customized with luxury features such as captain seating and in-motion satellite television. Our customer's satisfaction is our mission, storm chasing is our passion! Signup for a tour today and let us treat you to the Ultimate Storm Chasing Experience!™
Special Low Price for 5 Seats!
We have five seats on Tour 5 in 2009 available for the unbelievable low price of only $1700.00 (normal price is $2200.00) for a total cost savings to you of $500.00! This is due to a group who booked these seats and after paying their deposits they learned of an illness of one of their group's members. They have asked us to resale the seats and to apply their deposits to YOUR TOTAL COST! Once these 5 seats are sold, we won't be offering anymore seats at this rate. However, these seats must be paid-in-full at the time of your reservation.
UPDATE: There are only 4 seats left at this low price. Book Now - First come, first serve!
VST Welcomes The Weather Channel
The Weather Channel's own Jeff Mielcarz and "Road Crew" traveled with Violent Skies Tours in early May while storm chasing in southcentral Oklahoma. Many thanks to Jeff and his team for putting up with us during their time while storm chasing this year and we look forward to many more chases between our Road Crew and thiers!
View the video from The Weather Channel here:
VST Welcomes The BBC
During our 2008 storm chasing tours, our team had the sincere pleasure to host The BBC in Tornado Alley! During our adventures with The BBC on-board, we intercepted numerous severe and tornado warned supercells, including the tornadoes the occurred on the afternoon of May 29 that hit Kearney, Nebraska. For more information, visit The BBC's website at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7426385.stm
As a side note, we'd like to extend our condolences to our friend & customer "Nicole", whose mother sustained damage to her home in Kearney, NE on May 29, 2008. It's been a rough year for many people who live in Tornado Alley, including our own
guides uncle, who also sustained tornado damage to his home this year at his rural residence west of Pryor, OK. Thankfully our friends and family are all okay and were not physically injured during their very scary events, but not everyone was as fortunate. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to all.
Major Update Forthcoming
We've been so busy with the storm chasing season that we've not had time to get photos, videos and chaselogs from the field to the website. Our apologies to all those who enjoy reading our chaselogs. With the spring tornado season wrapping up, we're going to be working on updating the chase logs with photos and video from the 2008 storm chasing tours. And, we'd like to thank all our customers for helping us making this year one of our best ever.
Violent Skies Tours & Thunderbolt Tours Announce Strategic Partnership
It is our sincere pleasure to announce the partnership between Violent Skies Tours and Australian Thunderbolt Tours.
Thunderbolt Tours was established in 2002 and is the only Australian Storm Chasing Tour company to offer tours in Australia and Tornado Alley. Thunderbolt Tours' operators Jimmy Deguara and David Croan have been storm chasing since the early 1990s and are excited to join forces with Brian Barnes and the team at Violent Skies Tours.
The combined storm chasing and operating experience across two continents will provide our clients a truly unique and entertaining storm chasing expeditions that our industry has never seen before. This is truly a first of its kind partnership in the storm chasing tourism industry that combines the experience and mastery of two outstanding storm chasing teams and furthers our effort of offering The Ultimate Storm Chasing Experience™.
Special: Volumetric Radar Images of "Georgia Dome" Atlanta, Georgia Storm
A few hours ago (at the time of this writing) the Georgia Dome in Atlanta was hosting the Southeastern Conference Basketball Tournament between Alabama and Mississippi State when a storm ripped a hole into the roof of the 16-year-old building and sent fans fleeing for safety. We were tracking this storm on radar from our forecasting lab and have provided a 3D volumetric image of the storm taken just shortly after it hit the stadium. This image also provides an example of just one of the tools that we use during our storm chasing tours to help us develop successful and timely interception strategies while chasing.
Feb 26, 2008: 1st Tornado Warned Storm of 2008
Tour guide Brian Barnes and a small group intercepted a tornado warned supercell in east/central Florida during dusk. A chase log for the Feb 26 tornado warned supercell interception is available here: Florida tornado warned storm interception - storm chasing log.
April 2009 Update - 2009 Schedule Published
Our 2009 Storm Chasing Tour Schedule is now published and reservations are being accepted. We made a few exciting changes to the tour schedule and put a new spin (pun intended) on a few of our
specialty tours.
August 13 Update - Hurricane Chasing Deployments!
Calling all Hurricane Chasers! We can't just accept reservations for hurricane chasing based on a set schedule due to the highly unpredictable nature of hurricanes, if we did, it's possible that a hurricane might not make landfall and you would be out of the money. To solve this problem, we maintain a list of people who want to safely experience the intense power of hurricanes and who can quickly deploy to a designated airport and meet up with our interception team on very short notice; we call it the "QuickFlight List™".
To get started, you just need to email us today at:
info@violentskiestours.com
to let us know that you're interested and we'll contact you when we are considering a deployment. If you're available at the time then we'll arrange for a secure payment via PayPal and you'll be on your way to meet up with us to witness the amazing fury of nature's largest storms.
Mobile Communications Technology Upgrade
We have upgraded several key pieces of technology in our lead storm chasing van. This includes updating our live radar system with the newest state-of-the-art features; we've upgraded our mobile 2-way satellite communications system and expanded our cellular technology for mobile internet as well. The vans have also received a major overhaul to the in-van communications system, so even the people in the seated in the back can hear every word in-detail! You don't want to be on a tour when you can't hear about what is happening and nobody cares more about their storm chasing tour customers than Violent Skies!
Website Update: New Storm Chasing Logs Launched 2/26/2007
What started out as a major overhaul to our gallery, ended up being a brand new fully dynamic system to log our future storm intercepts. We selected various photographs from our old gallery and compressed everything down to a single page for a brief representation of our storm chasing tours from 1999 to 2006. All future chases will be logged in our new system that contains a summary of each storm chasing account along with various types of images and if available, a highlight video. We've already logged many key intercepts from the 2007 storm chasing tours. Click here to visit our new Storm Chasing Logs!
QuickFlight™ Storm Chasing Tours
QuickFlight Status: Not ActiveLast Update: June 10, 2008 - 5:06 AM CDT
In order to get signed up for these tours, you'll have to email us and let us know that you're interested in our "Tornado QuickFlight Tours". If we decide to operate a non-scheduled, pre-season tornado tour we will send out an email to everyone on our QuickFlight List to announce the tour. You'll then need to either call, or email us immediately to make arrangements for the tour.
