ST. GEORGE — Brody Cowing, a 16-year-old high school junior in Santa Clara, has a house that’s easy to pick out among the rest in the cul-de-sac. Boats and hauling trucks surround the suburban house while weather instruments and antennas reach out from the roof. The weather equipment belongs to this teenage weather enthusiast.
Cowing made national news with his photograph of a tornado touching down near St. George. The Washington Post included his photo among other Southern Utah weather photographers on August 22.
“Ten days ago was the first time a tornado was within view of St. George since 1994,” Cowing said. “There was more wind shear than anticipated, more atmospheric lift and moisture, and the precipitable water transport was greater than forecasted. It was really unexpected.”
“I was lucky,” he said. “I was just in the perfect spot, just between two houses, and I could see it. It was so cool.”
Many people misunderstand the difference between tornadoes and dust devils, Cowing said. Dust devils come from the ground up, while tornadoes originate from clouds and descend to the earth’s surface.
Cowing has always loved weather, he said, even when he was a child. His advanced knowledge began from a simple desire to feel the rain.
“I love rain, so I wanted to predict when it would rain,” he said. “It began from there.”
Even though Cowing lives in Santa Clara, Utah, where tornadoes are extremely rare, he said tornadoes are his favorite aspect of weather, and they’re “definitely the hardest to learn about.”
In order to understand and predict the weather from his home, Cowing said he monitors “big-scale weather systems, like 500-millibar, anomalous, high-pressure areas to low pressures over the Northern Pacific.” Cowing connects with national weather stations across the country, as well as through his own weather station built on top of his house.
“You need instruments. You need data. You need the whole ‘shebang.’”
Multiple official weather stations draw data from his own house, Cowing said, including Utah-based weather channels, “The Weather Channel,” “WeatherNation” and Las Vegas-based channels. Cowing said he and his father built their weather station during Christmas of 2019.
With a new camera designed to capture high-speed photos of lightning bolts, Cowing is thrilled to continue his search for lightning photos.
“Lesser-known than monsoon season, there’s a thing called transition season, between monsoon season and more typical winter,” Cowing said. “Those can bring storms, but not usually as intense as monsoon season. That’s pretty much the only thing I can look at now.”
As he looks to finish high in the next year and a half, Cowing said his dream school is Oklahoma University, “right in the heart of tornado alley,” where he would study meteorology. He traveled there last November to take a tour.
“That’s where a lot of the biggest storm chasers like Reed Timmer went,” he said. “It’s my dream. My dream is to then work at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, just the National Weather Service office in the area. Eventually, I want to become an on-air meteorologist.”
Crash Cowing, Brody Cowing’s father, said he raised his son outdoors as much as possible, hiking, camping and boating, so Brody Cowing has been immersed first-hand in weather his whole life, like experiencing thunderstorm surges and monsoon rains while boating.
Placed in the language-immersion program when he was five years old, Cowing has spoken Mandarin Chinese for 11 years, a feat he hopes will expand his weather career opportunities.
Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.