Four years ago, Dan and I started a new course at Purdue entitled Severe Storms Field Work. One of the students dubbed it Students of Purdue Observing Tornadic Thunderstorms for Research (SPOTTR), which became the unofficial class moniker. Our objective is to give students a taste of real severe weather research by involving them on our field programs, while teaching them the basics of severe storms forecasting and research techniques. All this happens in a scant four weeks. SPOTTR’s grown into a small phenomenon over the years, attracting students from outside atmospheric science and even from outside Purdue.

This year’s class field trip gets underway on Saturday, 25 May and runs through the end of May. As always, we’ll be using the Twitter handle @EAPS_SPOTTR.

We also have two special guests along for the ride: Mary Kay Carson and Tom Uhlman, who co-authored The Tornado Scientist children’s book in which I was featured earlier this year. They will be live-blogging the trip at stormchase2019.com. Please bookmark it and follow along!