Chasing an Addiction: Josh Morgerman's 4 Most Extreme Hurricane and Typhoon Chases

25 Years of Hurricane Chasing

For storm tracker Josh Morgerman, getting inside a tropical cyclone is an addiction, and it’s one he can’t explain.

Nearly 25 years ago, he realized his passion was in chasing extreme weather, but not chasing Plains tornadoes like so many others. He wanted to travel the world tracking tropical cyclones, and he wanted to be as close to the middle of those storms as he could get.

In 1991, as Hurricane Bob hammered the East Coast, Morgerman hopped on a train with $200 in a duffle bag, and over the next few days, he said he realized what he had suspected all along: He was born to chase tropical cyclones.

"It was almost like a mental illness," Morgerman recently told weather.com during a visit to the site's corporate headquarters in Atlanta. "From a very young age, I just got excited by the topic of being in a hurricane."

Since then, he has been all over Asia and North America, and he has chased more than 20 storms in the last decade alone. He said he hopes to someday make it to Madagascar to chase a tropical cyclone there, as well.

Morgerman took us inside his experiences of the four most extreme storms he has tracked in his 25-year career, starting with the last hurricane to make landfall in Florida.

Hurricane Wilma: 2005, Florida

Hurricane Wilma was the first storm Morgerman pursued in several hurricane seasons after living in Europe several years, and he admits his chasing skills were rusty at the time.

As Wilma approached the southwest coast of Florida in October 2005, Morgerman said it wasn't long before realized he was in trouble.

Wilma moved quickly as it approached landfall near Everglades City, where Morgerman was going to observe the storm. While studying Wilma, Morgerman noticed that the puddles around him were rapidly combining floodwaters, and the town was quickly being submerged.

"Suddenly, we notice we’re in the center of this town, and the water’s rising, and it’s surrounding the car," he said.

Morgerman and his crew fled to their hotel, parked their car as high on a raised driveway as they could and got inside, hopeful that the water level would not swallow the entire building. Just before the hotel was inundated, the water level stopped rising, and everyone inside was spared.

“Wilma really packed a punch," he said. "It was a storm. If you’d told me then that it was going to be the last major hurricane action the U.S. would have in over a decade, it would’ve blown my mind.”

NEXT >> Super Typhoon Haiyan

Super Typhoon Haiyan: 2013, the Philippines

The monster storm that killed more than 6,000 Filipinos was one of few storms that genuinely upset Morgerman. Watching death and destruction play out firsthand on such a large scale rattled him, he said, and despite his passion, he wasn't sure he wanted to chase hurricanes for a while after witnessing it.

Morgerman has a genuine love for the people of the Philippines, which might have made the experience  harder. He said he always been met by friendly, helpful people when he arrives to track a storm.

The locals were warned about storm surge before Super Typhoon Haiyan came ashore, but Morgerman said the residents didn't understand what that meant. In fact, they didn't even know it was a term used to describe water, he said.

When Haiyan's storm surge came in, it came in fast. Many said it had a tsunami-like quality, and although Morgerman had never witnessed a tsunami, he had seen old videos of tsunamis that ravaged the Japanese coast.

"What we saw in Tacloban City actually looked like those films from Japan.... If the government had said that there will be tsunamis, it would have saved lives. It would have been incorrect, but people would have understood," Morgerman told weather.com.

Then there was the relentless wind. It shattered windows, tore off roofs and knocked down doors. At one point, while inside the hotel, water invaded the first floor and began to trap people. Morgerman said he realized at that moment that he might witness death.

A last-ditch group effort kept everyone alive inside the hotel, but after the winds ceased and the flooding subsided, Morgerman said he saw nothing but devastation.

NEXT >> Hurricane Odile

Hurricane Odile: 2014, Baja Peninsula, Mexico

Morgerman hunkered down in a Cabo San Lucas hotel as Hurricane Odile, "big ol' truck tire hurricane," approached. The took hours to pass, and the town spent more than an hour in the eye of the storm.

But it wasn't until Baja got hit by the back side of the storm that it really started to feel Odile's true wrath.

"Being inside a building as it starts to blow apart was pretty intense. The whole lobby was just flying glass. My cameraman and I were both cut and bleeding," Morgerman said.

Looking back, Morgerman said it probably wasn't the smartest idea to stay in the hotel's lobby since it was such a big target for Odile's winds. All in all, the hotel held up fairly well in the face of a high-end Category 3 hurricane, especially when you consider that Mexico's Baja Peninsula is a stranger to major hurricanes like Odile.

"Baja Mexico is a lot like the (U.S.) Outer Banks. It gets a lot of hurricane action, but not usually the strong stuff," he said. "Odile was a direct hit by a very high-end Cat. 3, and that's outside their realm of experience."

Little did Morgerman know at the time that he'd be back in Mexico, albeit the mainland, a year later to cover the strongest hurricane ever recorded.

NEXT >> Hurricane Patricia

Hurricane Patricia: 2015, Mexico

Admittedly, the timing wasn't great for Morgerman when he learned about Hurricane Patricia. This chase would be more difficult since he was fighting a cold, but this was a storm he wanted to experience – even before it became the strongest hurricane weather forecasters had ever seen.

Like the Philippines, Morgerman likes chasing in Mexico. Residents there have a healthy attitude about hurricanes, Morgerman said. They prepare for the storm, but they don't panic. Stores were closed and metal shutters guarded windows. This left him confident they were ready for Patricia, even as it rewrote the history books.

Getting inside the storm's tiny inner core when it made landfall was no easy task. Morgerman said the storm wobbled "like a knuckleball" as it approached the coast, but in the end, he settled on the small town of Emiliano Zapata, between Puerto Vallarta and Manzanillo, to ride out the storm.

A few hours later, "Cinco Plus" (which translates to "five-plus," as in Category 5-plus), as the locals called it, was ripping off roofs and testing the sturdily-constructed homes along the coast. In terms of violence inside the inner core, Patricia ranks near the top of all storms Morgerman has studied, Haiyan included.

"It didn't disappoint, where we were," he said.

Winds became so strong during the worst of the storm that Morgerman and his crew couldn't point a camera at it. They had to get in a dark room and wait for the worst to recede.

After the storm moved away from Emiliano Zapata, Morgerman was met with an all-too-familiar scene of damage, but this one had something different. What was previously a lush, green landscape suddenly looked like barren winter, or even worse, an area that had just been ripped apart by a violent tornado. Trees were debarked and snapped off halfway up, and all the green had been replaced by muddy brown, or nothing.

And for all those who said Patricia underperformed, Morgerman has several days of harrowing memories to prove it didn't.

“If this exact storm had passed over Manzanillo, it would still be at the top of the news now.”

For recaps of all Morgerman chases, visit his website, iCyclone.