Twister tales: stormchasing in Tornado Alley, Oklahoma

Out on the US Great Plains a storm is brewing and that's great news for extreme weather fans on a tour that's all about witnessing the power of nature up close

Not too many people go on holiday hoping for bad weather. Here I'm surrounded by them. We're at yet another gas station, somewhere in southern Oklahoma. The sun is shining obstinately; it's another beautiful day, apart from a distant, unremarkable line of cumulus congestus, the type you'd see on many a summer's day in the UK. It was our second day stormchasing and I couldn't fathom why Roger, our tour leader and a well known figure on the chase circuit, was so fired up by these innocuous-looking piles of fluff. I was soon to learn why. While we do see them in Blighty, here on the US Great Plains, a tower of cumulus can spawn a monster. And we were about to see its teeth close up.

In the stuffy old Reader's Digest compendium my grandad gave to me, the most worn of the pages are the ones about the weather. In particular, one with a photo of the elephant's trunk of a tornado snaking outlandishly across the Great Plains. From the first time I saw that old black-and-white photo I wanted to see a tornado.