How understanding extreme weather can help ease eco-anxiety. BY MELISSA VINCENT

Understanding and embracing extreme weather can help soothe our eco-anxiety.

WHEN BETH ALLAN thinks about one of the most ferocious tornadoes she has ever encountered, she remembers the way the air sizzled as sky-splitting lightning bolts flashed around her. It happened in the Sandhills of Nebraska two years after she started chasing storms. Her Chevrolet Express got stuck attempting to scale a mountain, and she ended up directly in the path of the tornado. Golf-ball-size chunks of ice shattered her van’s windows, and the storm sounded like a roaring waterfall. Now she prefers to watch from a distance, but the experience left its mark. “Standing in front of some of the most powerful natural phenomena and feeling the ground shake because of the thunder and hearing the hail bouncing around in the clouds, you feel this incredible gratitude,” says the Calgary-based high-school counsellor and member of the group Prairie Storm Chasers. “You just get the sense of being really small.”

Allan is also a part of Girls Who Bolt, an organization of women who are united in their efforts to share poster-worthy images of tremendous storms. The group has 50,000 members all over the world, from the U.S. to Croatia. Allan estimates that women make up about half of the hobbyist chasers in Canada—a guess that’s supported by the fact that it’s not uncommon to have weather-reporting teams that are fully staffed by female meteorologists, some of whom also chase storms in their free time.

Photographs and videos capture the most awe-inspiring weather phenomena, like magenta- and eggplant-coloured clouds swirling like cotton candy or a giant funnel cloud winding in the sky before flinging itself down to earth as a tornado. But such images can give the misleading impression