M y name is Dean Gill, I'm a 42 years old Swiss storm chaser and meteorologist living in Geneva, Switzerland.
Although working for the Swiss national weather service as a forecaster, I consider myself more like a (severe) weather enthusiast. This passion for thunderstorms and tornadoes and more generally for extreme weather phenomena began during my early childhood.
I suppose everything started on the evening of 9/11 1970, when I was a five year old little boy. While I was staying at my grandmother's house in Padua, northern Italy, an exceptionally powerful tornado passed a few hundred meters away from my location, killing 35 people, injuring 500 others and leaving in its wake a 70km long path of complete destruction. Since that day, each time I see a storm approaching, the very peculiar atmosphere preceeding the storm as well as the sound of the tornado comes rushing back to my mind.
After this first encounter with severe weather, I had to wait several years before experiencing another significant storm. That was in the summer of 1986, on the outskirts of Geneva, when giant hailstones fell, smashing car windshields and destroying crops.
In 2002, thanks to Lionel Peyraud, a friend of mine and colleague who had studied at Texas A&M and knew a few experienced US storm chasers, I flew for the first time over the Pond to Tornado Alley and, at last, experienced the joy of storm chasing.
Now, each month of May, I set off for the States with a bunch of friends and hit the roads from Texas to North Dakota in search of supercells and tornadoes. This year will be my 6th trip to the Plains.
Besides this already expensive activity, I have other interests and hobbies, such as video, still photography and… gardening. I've invested quite a lot of money (actually all my savings) on broadcast video equipment in order to catch supercell storms with the highest possible quality.