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" To expand upon the many outlets for tornado awareness that began more than 80 years ago when the first mega twister hit, IMAX cinematographer Sean Casey and his team collect vital data from tornadoes for an upcoming film. He takes us behind the tech of his heavily armored storm chaser car -- the tornado intercept vehicle (TIV) -- that can drive directly into the eye of a storm.  Were you working from any plans when you built the TIV? It was totally my design. The idea was to build a vehicle -- a movable tripod-that we could film from through a turret. We could film in any direction, while moving and while stopped. And of course, the holy grail of our mission is to get a shot of tornado coming right at us, and then filming it as it comes toward us and then impacts us. How long did it take to complete the tornado intercept vehicle? It was five months. But the first vehicle that went out didn&amp;#039;t have a turret, and let me tell you, building a turret is tougher than you think. You have to mount an IMAX camera in there, so it&amp;#039;s not like you can mount [the turret] on a shaft that would be attached to a base. You have to mount it on a ring, what&amp;#039;s called a turret race. But the turret has never given us a problem, which has been awesome. That&amp;#039;s my largest technical feat yet. It took about six weeks, and most of that time was building these god-awful contraptions that did not work. I have quite an interesting pile of rusting metal outside my work. That&amp;#039;s been the whole process -- a learning curve. It took five years of building different contraptions and seeing if it worked, if it helped with our mission. We&amp;#039;re finally ready to build the second vehicle. Have you had any close calls with the current vehicle? No, we haven&amp;#039;t. The strongest winds we&amp;#039;ve probably encountered were a gust of 130 mph. A normal vehicle would be able to take that. It would lose its windshield, but if you encountered 130 mph winds, in all likelihood, the chances are you would survive. In our vehicle, encountering those winds, we really didn&amp;#039;t feel anything. There was the howling, of course, and the sand blasting, but it wasn&amp;#039;t like the vehicle was starting to lift. Have you ever reached a tornado and had to turn back because it was too strong? Three years ago, we were chasing a tornado that was a strong tornado, and it had winds of 190 mph. We had to back off, and we actually started tracking with it. When that tornado started to devolve and become less intensive, that&amp;#039;s when we intercepted it. [The waiting is] so hard, because you have certain roads that you can intercept on, and the minute you lose the option of a road -- that tornado is now over open country -- you have to wait it out. It&amp;#039;s excruciating. Do you ever have trouble with the police? The first year we went out, we got stopped a total of 14 times -- mainly out of curiosity, or our taillights were out. We haven&amp;#039;t been pulled over since that first year, except for a couple times when people were curious. They just wanted to say hello and check it out. We&amp;#039;ve been lucky, now in severe weather, they don&amp;#039;t stop us ever. But when there&amp;#039;s no severe weather, we get stopped, and it&amp;#039;s always fun. They&amp;#039;re nice people. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a1975/4219892/>