Melanie Metz will travel vast kilometres in pursuit of a storm. Photo / Marvin Joseph, The Washington Post
A storm began to form on the horizon and Melanie Metz drove straight towards it.
She craned her neck to get a clearer view of the dark, puffy clouds through the windshield.
She quickly looked back down at her phone mounted on the steering wheel, zooming in on the bright red and yellow spot on the radar map.
The colour announced an impending supercell, with the potential for a large tornado.
Metz had been monitoring the forecast from Minnesota to Montana for days.
Five big storms were brewing at once across the United States Great Plains, so she kept a close eye on their weather conditions - temperature, pressure, wind direction, and moisture - to gamble on which one to chase.
Confident in the storm straight ahead, she hit the pedal.
“I’ve dreamed about tornadoes since I was 5,” Metz said.
“In my dreams, I was always in a small town, trying to get into a shelter, but then the tornado would hit. It’s recurred for as long as I can remember.”
Metz, 49, began watching storms as a teenager as soon as she got her driver’s licence.
Now she’s one of the most famous chasers in the world, known to her friends as the “Tornado Queen”.
To fans, she’s the younger half of the “Twister Sisters”: the only female storm chasing duo to have a TV show dedicated entirely to their work.
Metz moved through an assortment of careers - chemist, masseuse, and operator of an adult foster care home.
Her true calling has always been to understand, chase, and photograph extreme weather.
“Some part of me believes I died in a tornado in a past life,” she said, explaining her heightened connection to storms and belief in the supernatural.
“I feel this element of fear and fascination. It made me want to see and understand tornadoes.”
In 1998, after graduating from college, Metz taught herself how to read the sky.
She chased violent weather using a textbook of storm features, a road atlas and paper maps of Minnesota and Nebraska.
At the time, she didn’t know that other people - let alone other women - shared her interest in tornadoes.
“Women just weren’t as public facing,” said, Jennifer Walton, founder of Girls Who Chase, a volunteer organisation that supports women storm chasers.
“They weren’t on television the way male chasers were. They just weren’t easy to find.
“It was frustrating for them, and that it was affecting them from an engagement perspective or even affecting business opportunities.”
By 2004, Metz had changed this. She met fellow storm chaser Peggy Willenberg.
The pair hit the road constantly. Together they began capturing footage of some of the most elusive tornadoes, earning them the Twister Sisters moniker.
In a field dominated by chasers looking to sell the most dramatic footage to TV stations or to go viral online, the pair earned a reputation for their humanity.
During the Hallam tornado in Nebraska in 2004, they saved a family whose house had collapsed on itself, trapping them in the basement.
In 2007, Metz and Willenberg starred in their own reality TV show, Twister Sisters, on the Women’s Entertainment Network, earning them wider notoriety.
“Twister Sisters was really the only female weather team I was even familiar with when I started chasing,” meteorologist and storm chaser Jessica Moore said.
“It’s so cool to see more and more women getting into chasing and starting to make names for themselves.”
While the 1996 movie Twister kick-started media representation of storm chasers, Twister Sisters was one of the earliest depictions of real female storm chasers in action.
“When I talk about women in storm chasing, people always mention Jo from Twister and they talk about how she’s a badass and all this kind of stuff,” Walton said.
“But the problem with Jo is that she’s not real and her character is now 28 years old. Melanie Metz is real.”
AccuWeather meteorologist Tony Laubach, a friend of Metz’s who appeared in one episode, said that the show fundamentally changed how female storm chasers were perceived, earning them respect they had lacked for decades.
“The Twister Sisters were iconic back in those days. You couldn’t go on a chase without hearing them mentioned,” Laubach said.
And that perception has endured. Back in North Dakota, Metz pulled up to a service station to join a group of Toyota RAV4’s all facing each other.
Each vehicle had its distinct battle scars from years of driving long distances straight into hailstorms. Metz and her car with a vanity licence plate “STORMZ” were instantly recognized.
“Yo, Melanie’s a legend,” said Tanner Charles, a chaser from Minnesota, as he turned his camera towards Melanie while recording a video for his live stream.
These impromptu convergences are the core of chaser culture. And they can be spots of unexpected connections and learning.
Chaser Raychel Sanner recalls running into Metz at a service station in 2005. She still considers that brief interaction one of the most important moments of her career.
“Melanie Metz was the first woman storm chaser I ever met,” Sanner said.
“That was kind of the foundation point where I was like everyone should do this, weather is for everyone. I was taken back, in a good way. Like, oh, wow, that’s really cool that there’s more than just guys out here.”
These days the Twister Sisters are no longer active as a partnership - Willenberg has retired from chasing, so Metz mostly chases alone.
“Especially after Twister Sisters came out, some women have approached me, thanked me, and said that you’ve inspired me to be interested in storms. Shoot, I’m getting emotional again,” Metz said as she dabbed away tears from her cheeks.
“I never knew at the time that I had such an impact on women who felt that there were barriers. ”
Still, there’s a marked divide between Metz and the younger chasers at the Killdeer service station. For starters, they’re all men.
Metz has clout as a former Twister Sister, but the guys have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media - and that’s how full-time storm chasers make a living.
“It’s almost the end of the chasing season, so the only people out right now are the hardcore chasers that live-stream and chase everything and make money off YouTube,” Metz explained. “The women still aren’t doing that.”
As the hours passed, Metz waited patiently for the storm to develop. She chatted with old friends and munched on a buffalo chicken wrap, casually gazing at the sky and refreshing her online radar every 10 minutes.
The guys in their 20s, however, got increasingly restless. They began smacking each other with colourful pool noodles, live-streaming the fight on YouTube.
“Our approaches are just different,” Metz said.
“They’re going to drive straight into a hailstorm to get video of their windshield being pummelled by ice. And they get a lot of views for that.
“But I think I serve a very different person, someone who appreciates my photography, a skyscape with the tornado.”
She admits there’s something to be gleaned from their style.
In a media ecosystem where there’s more money to be made off live-streaming extreme weather than capturing still photos, Metz said seeing the guys film and post their every move has inspired her to dabble in social media more.
“As a woman, there’s this sense of not wanting to brag,” Metz said. “Like, am I posting too much, am I seeking attention too much.”
It’s nearly nightfall and a tornado still hasn’t materialised. One by one, the guys peeled off, declaring the day a bust. But Metz decided to wait overnight for storms.
If you saw a massive tornado every time, it wouldn’t be special, she mused.
As a Twister Sister, she had learned there’s beauty in all parts of the chase, and getting too obsessed with the tornado can be dangerous.
“Sometimes I see guys who are pushing the boundaries and it’s not tasteful,” Metz said.
“They’re like ‘debris, debris’ when that’s someone’s home. It comes across as thrill-seeking. And I worry somebody is eventually going to get caught off guard and get too close.”
On her first-ever solo chase on June 18, 2001, Metz witnessed a long-tracked F3 tornado hit Siren, Wisconsin, killing three people. She lost friends in the infamous 2013 El Reno tornado.
Metz considers her own chasing and filming style - appreciating storms through the lens of photography and respecting the strength of nature - to be an essential counterbalance to the hooting and hollering of the chasers who seem to relish the destruction.
“I’m not just this blond chick finding tornadoes,” Metz said. “There’s so much more to it than that.”
The next afternoon in Dawson, Minnesota - Metz’s home state - the conditions quickly materialised. The clouds grew wispy and speckled across the sky.
As Metz stood in the grass, camera in hand, they darkened and converged into one supercell, covering the entire field.
Striations emerged, forming distinct layers and shading.
The clouds looked less like a vast rainstorm and more like a UFO, with soft tendrils extending down to the field and rings extending into the sky - a “mother ship supercell”, as it’s known to storm chasers.
Metz let out delighted gasp and quickly switched from her camera to her phone to take a panorama of the scene. She declared that it’d been a while since she’d seen a clear mother ship.
“It’s not a tornado,” Metz said.
“But for a story about women in storm chasing, I think it’s pretty beautiful.”
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