Maple Grove Storm Chasers

As the season for thunder and lightning rolls in, Maple Grove's weather chasers turn their eyes toward the skies.

By: Jake Mohan | From the issue: April 2009

Photo: Marshall Franklin Long

Michael Stanga and John Wetter, who both hail from Maple Grove represent two generations of storm chasers. Both love their avocation, but stress the underlying seriousness of the work: helping prevent loss of life and property.

One reason John Wetter like living in Maple Grove is that it's conveniently located near I-94, Route 12, and Highways 7 and 5, the roads he takes to commute to work--in a way.

Those four roads are what Wetter calls good "tornado roads"--routes he can take to get to the scene of a storm quickly. Wetter is a storm chaser, and his professional and leisure lives dovetail in the art of chasing. In the spring and summer he loads his arsenal of cameras and computers into his car and heads for the anticipated site of a severe storm or tornado. If he's lucky, he'll see a twister touch down, get plenty of photos and video footage, and upload the results to his website, wxchaser.com.

By day Wetter is an IT manager for Hopkins Public Schools. But he also coordinates operations for the Twin Cities-based Upper Midwest office of Skywarn (skywarn.org), a volunteer weather-tracking organization formalized by the National Weather Service in the 1970s. Wetter earned his meteorology degree from St. Cloud State in 2002, and weather has been a lifelong fascination for him.

"It's one of the newest sciences," Wetter says. "Meteorology has only been formally studied for about 100 years now, which [compared to] the base sciences, is yesterday. The United States didn't even have a weather service until we got into the world wars, when the Navy started losing ships to weather."

Wetter sells some of his storm photos and footage to KSTP Channel 5. He also contributes footage to a video series, The Storms of..., whose proceeds go to Red Cross disaster relief. When severe weather occurs in south-central Minnesota, Wetter is either out chasing it or at the Twin Cities' Weather Forecast Office in Chanhassen, which monitors weather throughout a 51-county radius. There he helps Skywarn evaluate the need for storm watches and warnings. For the past three springs, Wetter has also organized a conference where he and his wife, Jamie (also a storm chaser), lead training workshops for Skywarn volunteers.

Because chasing is a traveling hobby, it takes the Wetters all over Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin. Last year, the pair drove 6,000 miles during 26 days of chasing, and logged nine "successful" days when they spotted storms.

Having lived in and around Maple Grove all his life, Wetter likes the area because it's close enough to Minneapolis to take advantage of that city's urban amenities, but he can avoid traffic and get to rural areas quickly during a chase. Maple Grove is also home to National Camera, where Wetter buys most of his equipment. (He also upgrades to a new laptop every other year.)