In September, when Typhoon Bebinca brought torrential rain to China’s eastern seaboard, most people huddled inside and tried to wait out the storm. Not Su Dike though. The 23-year-old packed his cameras and drove through the night from Hangzhou to Shanghai, his eyes set squarely on the heart of the storm.

In his ensuing videos, shorn tree branches and fallen billboards populate scenes of chaos. What he captured was remarkable: firsthand footage of the typhoon, the largest to make landfall in Shanghai since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Su is one of China’s most popular storm chasers, combining a passion for extreme weather with a mission to deepen public understanding of climate science. In his adventures, Su and his team have covered over 60,000 kilometers across China, often traveling to remote locations to chase typhoons, tornadoes, and hailstorms. On the Chinese video streaming site Bilibili, his channel Fengyujiang-SDK has more than 330,000 followers and 34 million views. One of his most popular videos, “This is what we call a watered-down video” from 2020, introduces how water vapor circulates under climate change, and has garnered over 10 million views. Apart from this, his documentary Soul of Storm won the best short documentary prize at the Roma Short Film Festival in 2023.

The eye of a typhoon

Su’s initial interest in storm chasing originated from the screen. When he was 10, he watched the American movie Twister and became a fan of the director, Jan de Bont. “I was attracted by what these American young people were doing in the movie,” Su tells TWOC. “Driving their self-made armored vehicle on the highway, they risked being torn to shreds to capture stunning footage of storms. Their behaviors inspired me: Why can’t we do the same thing in China?”

It was in 2012 that Su experienced a real storm for the first time, as he moved with his family from the inland city of Chengdu, where storms are rare, to Hangzhou, the capital of coastal Zhejiang province. That August, Typhoon Haikui swept through the streets and buildings of Hangzhou, causing a terrific scene.

For residents of China’s eastern seaboard, such typhoons are an annual occurrence. During the typhoon season, usually July to August, locals stock up on food. When a typhoon is about to make landfall, people are forced to stay at home, as public transportation is usually suspended and fishing boats are banned from going out to sea.

“When I was a kid, I was especially afraid of the sound of thunder and wind, but now I have a yearning for these sounds, probably because I’m slowly learning about them,” Su says. “Even though the surrounding storm is very intense, the center of a typhoon is actually peaceful.”

This occurs because the outward spinning force of the rotating air balances with the inward-pulling winds, canceling each other out and creating a peaceful zone amid the surrounding chaos. “We can watch on a remote-sensing image that the middle looks like an eye,” Su says. “However, it’s super difficult to get into the mysterious eye and have a look.”

The first typhoon Su chased was Super Typhoon Lekima, which made landfall on August 10, 2019. Su had just celebrated his 18th birthday and got an offer from his dream school. “My father thought I was crazy,” Su jokes, “but he eventually agreed to be my driver for the journey into the storm.”

The initial attempt didn’t bring Su much spectacular footage, but it opened the door to a whole new world. Every typhoon season, Su embarks on storm chasing, aiming to reach the eye of the storm. On his video blog, he documents his journeys, with him and his friends driving through heavy rain. “While the vast majority of people flee the storm, we head for the center of it,” Su says proudly.

There are many challenges. Storms can shift, meaning the chasers sometimes have to forge ahead through uncharted terrain where no roads exist. “And we need to calculate the possible location the storm will make a landfall,” Su explains. It’s easy for a vehicle to get stuck in muck, or for the storm to outrace them.

After they reach an ideal observation point, Su sets up his tripod and begins shooting videos and photos. At the same time, he uses a drone to capture aerial footage. Apart from this, he designed a small vehicle-mounted weather station with a temperature sensor.

To date, Su has chased 300 storms. In his documentary, he shows the public what it’s like inside the heart of the swirling beast. During one of his journeys, he even spent a night in the middle of a typhoon, as his car was trapped by fallen trees. “Every storm chaser has their own story of spending a night in the heart of a storm,” Su says.

A growing community in China

When Su was in middle school, China’s storm-chasing enthusiasts were few. As smartphones and social media were not yet widespread in China, storm fans relied on online forums to communicate and share their experiences. The largest was Typhoon BBS, which was founded by the Shanghai Typhoon Institute of the China Meteorological Administration. “My initial knowledge about storm chasing mostly came from Typhoon BBS,” Su recalls.

Typhoon BBS initially attracted little attention when it was established in 2002. However, as typhoons became more frequent and their destructive power was increasingly recognized by both the Chinese government and the public, interest surged. By the 2006 typhoon season, the number of posts had grown to approximately 20 times that of the previous year. In the summer of 2011, a thread dedicated to tracking Typhoon Muifa set a record for forum activity, amassing over 2.7 million views.

As Su’s storm-chasing expertise grew, he began transitioning toward a more professional approach. He started a website called Storm-Chasers Tracker to track real-time weather information, as well as log the precise locations of fellow storm chasers on a radar map. “A precise radar map is as vital to a storm chaser as a GPS map is to a driver,” Su explains. However, computational modeling inevitably has limitations when it comes to aligning perfectly with reality, so Su also designed a mapping function for users. “We can mark our location and environment around us in a storm chase. The shared online map can help us cooperate with each other and find the best path to approach the storm.”

The growth of the storm-chasing community underscores the rising awareness and fascination with extreme weather in China. After Typhoon BBS was shut down for financial reasons, people created an unofficial forum called TY Board to continue discussions and share resources. Su was one of the original moderators and designed its logo.

It’s on this platform that Su met a group of like-minded enthusiasts. One of them became his storm-chasing partner, who goes by the alias Xianrenqiu.

For storm chasers, finding a reliable partner can only help. On Su’s video channel, Xianrenqiu frequently appears as a voiceover, injecting comedy into the footage. While they share the same enthusiasm, the two young men have different philosophies when it comes to chasing storms. On one bumpy trip, Su clutches his laptop and tensely calculates the path of the storm, while Xianrenqiu holds a stick in his hand and mouths an incantation, praying for the storm to land the right way.

“Predicting a storm falls somewhere between science and metaphysics,” Su says. Each storm chaser brings their own unique personality, perspective, and motivation to the table, making every chase a deeply personal and distinct experience.

What storms mean

China is a hotbed for extreme weather, with two-thirds of the country in a monsoon climate zone. As global warming increases the frequency of previously once-in-a-generation weather events, public discussions around meteorology have resurfaced.

“Some people assume that we are challenging our lives just for the thrill,” Su says. “But the significance of storm chasing goes far beyond this.”

One field that can take advantage of storm chasing is disaster research. In drone footage of the aftermath of a tornado, shot by Su in Shandong province, one-third of the sheet-iron roof of a factory was destroyed; in another picture taken five kilometers away, the roof of a gas station is completely torn off. “We can overlay several pictures on a map and figure out the path of one storm,” Su tells TWOC. By following the virtual path, researchers can form a storm model more precisely and evaluate the damage it has caused. “Our firsthand footage can be helpful in architectural studies, especially to prove the wind resistance of different buildings in China,” Su says.

During his nearly decade-long observation of storms, Su witnessed the conflict between nature and society. Although humans have made remarkable advancements in weather forecasting, including the use of AI-powered large-scale weather models, Su’s work shows that mankind still faces significant challenges in preventing floods and droughts.

Despite the destruction that storms can cause, Su says that storms aren’t always a bad thing. Those seemingly violent downpours also bring water and cool air to fertilize plants and shape China’s agricultural landscape. “Our ancestors observed clouds, lightning, and other natural phenomena to forecast the weather and guide agricultural works,” he says. “We are doing the same thing. The only difference is we have better technology to have a closer look.”