Reading the Sky: The Intersection of Art and Engineering, and Stormchasing in the Study of Severe Weather

Standing on the shoulder of the highway, the rain-free base rotating maybe five kilometres out, and the wall cloud is dropping: slow, deliberate, indifferent, and every instinct your body has ever developed across millions of years of evolution is screaming at you to get back in the car. But you don’t. You stay. Because there is nothing else on earth that makes you feel so precisely, so mercifully small.

It is a specific kind of smallness. Not the smallness of failure or irrelevance, but the smallness of standing at the edge of something so much older and larger than your problems that they simply evaporate. The storm does not know your name. It does not know your debts, your grief, your ambitions. It is a twenty-thousand-meter column of organized chaos, and it is the most beautiful thing you will ever see. 

There is a low, freight-train pressure that a maturing supercell puts into the air around it, not the intensity or potential for itself, not yet, but the storm’s own breathing: protesting the existence of its vitality. You feel it in your sternum before you hear it. I had read about this. Modelled this. Discussed this to the ends of the Earth. I had not felt it. And in the gap between those two things, between the known and the experienced, something shifted in how I understood what impact that severe storm engineering had the potential to make. Could this be what has commanded the attention of artists for centuries?

It is a specific kind of smallness. Not the smallness of failure or irrelevance, but the smallness of standing at the edge of something so much older and larger than your problems that they simply evaporate. The storm does not know your name. It does not know your debts, your grief, your ambitions. It is a twenty-thousand-meter column of organized chaos, and it is the most beautiful thing you will ever see. 

There is a low, freight-train pressure that a maturing supercell puts into the air around it, not the intensity or potential for itself, not yet, but the storm’s own breathing: protesting the existence of its vitality. You feel it in your sternum before you hear it. I had read about this. Modelled this. Discussed this to the ends of the Earth. I had not felt it. And in the gap between those two things, between the known and the experienced, something shifted in how I understood the potential impact that severe storm engineering could have. Could this be what has commanded the attention of artists for centurie

It is starkly impossible to express the brilliance of the colours of as storm. That sickly copper-green light that leaks through the updraft base, the way the inflow winds drag scud low and fast beneath the rotation like smoke pulled under a door. The almost unnatural dark blue of a thunderstorm, creeping towards you faster than you’d think, warning all those in its path of the sheer potential for destruction that it possesses. The lightning, not the fork-and-flash of a garden variety thunderstorm, but long, branching, architectural strikes that illuminate the entire anvil from inside flickering the way a dying bulb flickers at a scale that is almost impossible to contextualize. Trying to put words to the array of colours and textures that become visible during such a surge of power is a challenge I have yet to overcome.

That is what the intersection of art and engineering actually looks like; not in a gallery, not in a design studio, but on a gravel road in Alberta with the sky coming down to meet you. The place where the equation becomes the painting, where the data becomes the light. The meteorologist and the artist are not two different people standing in that field. They are the same person, undone. The engineering gets you close enough to understand it. The art is what reminds you why you wanted to. As a field research intern with the Canadian Severe Storms Lab, my 2025 summer was spent chasing, analyzing, and understanding these storms. Early mornings were spent checking radar and cloud scans, a skill I was grateful to quickly be immersed into. Otherwise complex atmospheric terms became conversational jargon and inside jokes faster that you may imagine; spending twenty straight hours in a vehicle with a team of adrenaline hungry scientists is quite possibly the quickest way to learn how to articulate what I could see, and maybe more so, what I felt.

By the end of the summer, I watched the winds stack nearly parallel to the surface flow, identifying textbook hodographs, the kind that made the senior researchers on the team lean forward in their chairs. I began to understand exactly what made the CAPE explosive, what sustained the Cap that had held through the noon hour and then broke clean, and I could articulate what I saw in the discrete supercell that fired along the dryline, which was doing exactly what the model I could interpret suggested it would. I understood, technically, everything that was happening. I could name every feature. I could explain the rear-flank downdraft, the rotating mesocyclone, the inflow jet dragging surface air into the updraft base at speeds that tore the grass flat.

And still, nothing in my training prepared me for greeting it face to face.

When I’m asked about my favourite part of reenacting what can only be described as “Twisters in real life”, it is the fact that the instruments don’t chase storms-we do. The radar gives you the hook echo, the rotation couplet, the estimated hail size climbing through five centimetres and still growing; instruments give you all the data. But someone has to drive toward it. Someone has to make the call at the intersection: turn north into the lion’s cage, or punch south and reset. That decision lives in a place that no algorithm has touched. It is built from pattern recognition, yes, from ten thousand hours of case studies and post-event analyses. But it is also built from something quieter: a feel for the storm’s mood, a micro-expression that can only be understood from staring down a storm face to face, a sense of when it is organizing versus when it is beginning to die, the same way a sculptor knows when a piece is complete.

That tension, between understanding something and truly feeling it, is exactly what drew me to the work I was so grateful to participate in with Atmospheric Shifts at Western University’s McIntosh Gallery, where I worked as a student advisor and produced mass and size accurate 3D printed hailstones.

The exhibition responds to philosopher Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject: the idea that climate change is so profound and so dispersed across time and space that the human mind simply cannot hold it. After spending a summer watching supercells on radar, I understood this immediately. You can know a storm, but you cannot know the atmosphere; its unpredictable mood; and its ever-changing state commands attention; far larger than I could conceptualize. The sheer power that these storms have the potential to produce is often overlooked, and was a leading theme I hoped to bring into my artistry. The curatorial challenge, and what made my role feel so very alien yet worthwhile, was helping bridge the research coming out of Western’s own Northern Hail Project, with my own take on an engineer’s art project. I wanted to make something the data alone never could: make people feel their place inside something incomprehensibly large.

Lisa Hirmer’s images sit with the permanent weight of human imprint on the sky. David Spriggs works from satellite imagery in a way that asks you to consider how much of our understanding of nature is mediated, how the storm on the monitor and the storm in the field are not quite the same thing. Wally Dion brings something that none of the engineering research could offer: an Indigenous framework in which the tornado is not a fluid-dynamics event but a spiritual force, ancient and deliberate. Sitting with all of that, the radar composites alongside the canvases, the field notes alongside the cinematic stills, I keep thinking about the number of afternoons spent watching, listening and feeling on the deceivingly sunny afternoons in Alberta. The instruments had told me everything I needed to know, and still I had stood there, not quite able to close the gap between what I knew and what I was seeing. That gap, it turns out, is where art lives.

The exhibition doesn’t resolve the tension between science and feeling. It argued, convincingly, that the tension is the point.

My contribution to the exhibition was, on its face, a simple engineering problem. Take the collected field data, hailstone dimensions, precise mass measurements collected from ground surveys after significant storms and produce physical replicas accurate enough to be honest, to make visitors take a second glance. I had held the real thing plenty of times in Alberta, sometimes still cold from the updraft, sometimes half-melted by the time we reached it on the ground.

After settling on PETG-3D printing as my medium of portrayal, for its unmistakable precision and forgiving adaptability, the process of printing itself demanded the same rigor the field work did: density had to match, the oblate geometry had to match, the weight in the hand had to be right, because the weight was the whole point. A number on a damage report does not move people. But picking up the thing that punched through a windshield, that stripped a canola field bare in forty seconds, that does.

What I didn’t expect was how much the process would loop back on itself. I had chased the storms that produced hailstones like these. I had logged them in field reports and handed the data up a chain that eventually fed research, which eventually fed an art exhibition, which eventually put that object in a stranger’s hand in a gallery in London, Ontario. Somewhere between the supercell and the plinth that these replicas now stand on, the engineering had turned into something else entirely. I’m still not sure what to call it, and I’m not sure that simply ‘art’ nor ‘science’ can encompass it all.

What Atmospheric Shifts does- quietly, without making a case for itself, was close that distance. Not by making art feel more like engineering, but by uncovering that engineering, in its most honest form, was already asking the same questions. Why does this storm form here and not there? What does it mean that we can predict destruction to the hour and still stand powerless in front of it? How do you communicate something to a person that the numbers have failed to reach? Those aren’t only scientific questions, and in fact, never were. The storm chaser and the artist are both, in their own way, trying to put a frame around something that resists framing. I came into that gallery with field data and a 3D printer and left with a way of thinking about my own work that I hadn’t had before: the sense that the most rigorous thing you can do with knowledge, sometimes, is hand it to someone and watch them try to picture what is equivalent to a softball, come through a window or plummet deep into a field of corn crops.

Now, heading into my second summer of stormchasing, I carry that shift with me. The science hasn’t changed; I’ll still be reading soundings at dawn, still plotting intercepts, still standing on the wrong side of a hail core wondering if the data I’m collecting will matter to anyone beyond the spreadsheet it lands in, but I think about the person in the gallery holding that hailstone now in a way I didn’t before. The research doesn’t demystify the storms. It gave me a new language for the mystery. As I step into a leadership role this summer, part of what I want to bring into the field, and more so into my own chemical engineering research, is that instinct for translation. The understanding that data unexplained is data half-finished, and that the most technically sound work in the world goes nowhere if it can’t reach the person who needs to feel it.

The exhibit taught me that science and art are both, at their core, acts of attention: careful, sustained attention to how the world actually behaves, whether someone is watching or not, and a commitment to communicating that honestly. I don’t know what this summer holds, but I do know that Hail Alley has a way of humbling you on that front. I know I’ll be watching the storms differently now, not just as systems to be measured and logged, but as the kind of thing that, if you find the right way to hold it up to the light, might make someone understand something they couldn’t before, and maybe in doing so, care enough to act. In the end, is what both the engineer and the artist are after: not just to witness the storm, but to make sure it cannot be looked at the same way again.

Artists have long painted skies through intuition and observation alone. Atmospheric science offers them something richer: a nuanced vocabulary for what they’re seeing. Understanding how electromagnetic Mie scattering elongates the red wavelengths at sunset, or how ice crystals in cirrus clouds produce halos and sun dogs, doesn’t detract from the wonder, it compounds it. More practically, atmospheric science gives contemporary artists tools for definition and accuracy. Knowing the physics of a cumulonimbus system, how wind shear flattens its top, how a downdraft produces the gust front shelf cloud beneath it, allows a painter or illustrator to render weather with structural correctness rather than mimesis alone.

Understanding the boundary layer, dew point, and humidity behavior turns these phenomena from accident into instrument; science seamlessly becomes a medium stronger than paint or pencil. The reciprocal benefit is equally deep, and arguably less recognized within the scientific community.

Beyond the historical record, art trains the observational habits that science needs. Meteorologists and atmospheric scientists work from satellite data, LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) returns, and model output, mediated representations of phenomena. Artists who study the sky directly develop a perceptual sensitivity to atmospheric structure that instrumented systems can miss or misclassify. Art also offers atmospheric science something it struggles to build internally: narrative. Communicating forecast uncertainty, for instance, is a notoriously hard problem. Weather graphics that try to show probabilistic outcomes are routinely misread by the public as showing what will happen rather than what might. Artists, designers, and information visualization practitioners have spent decades thinking about how to communicate ambiguity, probability, and change visually; the atmospheric sciences have much to absorb from that tradition.

The most productive intersections aren’t instrumental but dialogic; this supports contrasting fields that utilize the other as a tool. The question of what a cloud is has different answers in fluid dynamics, in phenomenology, and in the history of landscape painting, and each answer illuminates the others; the boundary between observer and observed shifts in ways that benefit both. Notably, the arrows don’t all run the same way; atmospheric science doesn’t simply supply raw material for artists to aestheticize- the exchange is bidirectional.

It was the science that drew me to pursue a career in severe storm resilience engineering, but it was the ‘je ne sais quoi’ of it all that I fell in love with; something I believe that the engineers and artists of the world have in common. It is this type of interdisciplinary collaboration that enables a new understanding in an ever-evolving world, one that is only beginning to reap the benefits of multifaceted approaches to what was once considered impossible.

Julia Martin is a second-year chemical engineering student at the University of Western Ontario, and a hail research intern at the Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory. She spends her summers in Olds, Alberta, conducting real-time storm analysis on severe hail, tornado, and wind events. In her free time, she enjoys riding her bike, baking, and spending time in the Rocky Mountains. She hopes to continue pursuing a career in environmental engineering and looks forward to another summer of storm tracking, public outreach, and environmental research!

Atmospheric Shifts, currently at the McIntosh Gallery until May 16th.

This project is graciously supported by the London Arts Council through the City of London’s Community Arts Investment Program.