"With Matt Biddle, an Ahab-like veteran storm chaser as his guide, Mark Svenvold draws a portrait of a culture enamored by extremes during a 6,000-mile journey through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. Along the way, the author encounters an assortment of characters out of a Fellini film: a duo named the Twister Sisters, from St. Cloud, Minnesota; a crowd-pleasing trio from CUPP (California University of Pennsylvania at Pittsburgh); a team of chaser-scientists who have partnered with an IMAS filmmaker from Los Angeles who drives an armor-plated truck; and a stock car racer from North Carolina whose goal is to drive through a tornado." "Big Weather is a wryly observed meditation upon the weather as a marketable celebrity and what this says about us. In Mark Svenvold's prose we confront the tornado's awesome power while keeping company with a merry band of meteorological savants ready to drop everything and drive hundreds of miles in pursuit of the next big one."--BOOK JACKET.