Driving through the area known as Tornado Alley - from the Rio Grande in southern Texas, north to the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan - Meola photographed a forbidding landscape where atmospheric instability collides with moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and spectacular cumulonimbus clouds form at twilight. Over a period of several years he documented a landscape of elemental forces, where immense storms percolate miles above the ground, rotating with energy until tornadoes spin on the horizon. And he discovered a country of haunting beauty where the wail of coyotes and the glow of constellations fill the prairie's void with simple graces. "This book extends that narrative and reaches something profound," says Bruce Springsteen of these new photographs. Fierce Beauty: Storms of the Great Plains includes more than 100 photographs of tornadoes, lightning, dust storms, and storm phenomena, as well as a detailed and vivid description of a moment-by-moment close encounter with a cataclysmic tornado by renowned storm chaser and meteorologist William T. Reid.
