Norman, Okla. ? The rusting, weather-beaten equipment atop Chad Albee’s 1994 Jeep Cherokee testify to the years he’s spent chasing storms.

Whether it’s tornado-producing thunderstorms in the Plains states or hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, the active-duty Navy man enjoys spending his free time chasing and monitoring the violent, sometimes deadly storms that rip through the nation’s heartland.

“It’s a self-sustained weather station on wheels,” said Albee, whose “Cyclone Express” was one of about a dozen storm-chasing vehicles on display Saturday during the National Weather Festival in Norman.

Albee’s Jeep, which earned the award for most working sensors during the festival’s storm chaser car show, is outfitted with a small-vessel marine radar, rain gauge, wind-speed measuring tool and even a siren and public-address system to warn residents who may be in danger.

There’s no shortage of severe weather for Albee and other storm chasers to track in Oklahoma, where warm, moist Gulf air frequently combines with cooler air masses from the north to result in powerful storms capable of producing tornadoes.

And while chasing storms is a dangerous activity, the data and observations collected in the field are invaluable to storm researchers.

Storm chasing began in earnest in 1972, when federal researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Severe Storms Laboratory needed in-the-field verification for the data they were receiving from the Doppler radars they were using to track weather, said Don Burgess, a retired division chief from the storm lab.

“(Storm) intercept has grown over time,” Burgess said. “We’ve intercepted somewhere between 400 and 500 tornadoes and gained a lot of new understanding and developed conceptual models.”

One early technique used by researchers – dubbed the totable tornado observatory, or TOTO – proved to be the inspiration for a popular movie about storm chasers. TOTO was a large device loaded with storm sensors that weighed several hundred pounds.

“We’d have this thing on the back of a pickup truck, drive in front of a storm, roll it down a ramp and get out of there,” said Kevin Kelleher, deputy director of the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

TOTO eventually was retired and made its way into a museum, where Kelleher said writer Michael Chrichton saw the device and was inspired to write the 1996 movie “Twister.”

The movie, which starred Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt as storm chasing researchers, included a take-off of TOTO, named Dorothy, that Paxton’s character was trying to deploy.

TOTO, Dorothy and another prop from the film all are housed at the National Weather Center in Norman, a newly constructed building on the south edge of the University of Oklahoma’s campus that houses about a dozen federal and university-related weather researching entities.

Kelleher, who worked as a technical consultant on “Twister,” contacted Universal Studios, which agreed to loan the items to be displayed at the weather center.