My name is Brad Rousseau and I am obsessed with everything weather. My fascination with weather began at a young age as a horrible fear of severe weather. My fear forced me to gain knowledge on the subject and turned the fear into a love of weather.
I graduated from York University with an Honours Bachelor of Science in Atmospheric Science and a Certificate in Meteorology. While attending York University, I worked as a severe weather research assistant at Environment Canada. My job was to quality check and update the Ontario tornado database including re-investigating historic events in order to determine F-scale ratings or whether the storm was tornadic or not. I also gathered tornado database information across Canada to create one national tornado database. This database was used to update the Canadian building code for tornado prone areas.
Once I graduated university, I was hired on as a meteorologist forecaster at The Weather Network. I currently work there as a forecaster and if you check your app or the website for the forecast, every now and again it will be mine! I mostly forecast for the western domain of Canada including from northwestern Ontario right across the Prairies and British Columbia. From time to time I will forecast for the eastern domain.
In 2010 I embarked on my first storm chasing trip with Dayna Vettese, Mark Robinson and some fellow classmates. We met up with Scott McPartland and Dave Lewison from New York and have chased with them ever since. My first tornado ever was the multi-vortex, merry-go-round meso EF3 tornado in Medford/Wakita, Oklahoma on May 10, 2010. This just so happened to be our very first chase day as well. Like many other chasers that day, we got chased down the highway by the tornado as it was moving at 100 km/h. We saw several more tornadoes that year as well as great hail storms, lightning, structure, you name it. In 2011, I chased again. One of the more memorable storms that year was the Ada, Oklahoma tornado on May 21, 2011.
In 2012, we went chasing again, we couldn't stay away. This was an especially memorable year because the trip featured tornadoes, hail, structure, lightning and ... an engagement! I proposed to Dayna Vettese on May 19, 2012 in front of the Kingman, Kansas tornado. She said yes! It was the most stressful chase day I have experienced because I had to get a tornado in order to propose. The rest of the trip was fantastic. We saw many more tornadoes and had a great time reconnecting with friends. We chased again in 2013 and witnessed several tornadoes including the Bennington, Kansas wedge and the deadly and powerful El Reno, Oklahoma tornado.
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