During the spring, as thunderclouds form and twisters charge across the Kansas plains, you can find Dr. Jason Persoff in his 2014 Kia Sorento.
With him, an iPad and ham radio. He's chasing tornadoes, his springtime hobby for the past 25 years.
When the chill of winter quiets the air, he chases another natural phenomenon in his backyard: snowflakes.
Persoff -- or "storm doctor" as he's known -- is a tornado chaser, hospitalist, snowflake photographer and, at one point, stand-up comic. He's earned international recognition for his work with weather, from capturing the minute intricacies of ice crystals to funnel clouds that tower over Mount Everest.
"When I'm connected to nature on such an intimate level it's a practice of mindfulness and gratitude," said Persoff, a physician at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora. "I can get caught up in stress just like anybody else, and these processes slow me down, give me space to be a kid, to just sit there in fascination."
Persoff has been storm chasing since the mid-1990s, having been fascinated by severe weather since he was a child growing up in Aurora. During those early days, he would chase with his wife, Irma Persoff, around the Denver metro area. That's when he coined his "storm doctor" nickname.
In 1997, Jason Persoff had his first "real success" locating a storm in southwest Kansas. A recent medical school graduate, he got so excited to see a tornado touch down that he double-tapped his video camera and ended up with footage of his feet rather than the storm. But just seeing the tremendous scale of clouds with his eyes had him hooked.
"Storm chasing is a chance to stand in wonder," he said. "Part of the fun of storm chasing is to try and pull elements together to give this sense of grandeur and amazement from what is essentially just water vapor."
Persoff likes to capture large-scale scenes of storms rather than close-ups, which also means he runs less of a risk of getting caught in a dangerous situation.
"The tornadoes up close are kind of all the same," he said. "What is dramatically different to me is seeing the entire cloudscape with the tornado sort of being the 'chef's kiss.' Even if I don't see a tornado, if I can get the incredible storm structure, I am just as happy as can be about that."
Throughout his summers chasing twisters, he's met other storm chasers from around the world, whom he considers dear friends. The chasers will often meet in the evening after a storm to "commiserate or celebrate," Persoff joked.
But when the season changes, so does Persoff's focus. Photographing snowflakes is one of his newer hobbies, a craft he picked up after moving back to Colorado from Florida a little more than 10 years ago.
"I wanted to recapture some of the magic that I experienced in the winter, but I didn't know how. One day, I was flipping through social media, and I came across photos of a snowflake up close by a guy named Don Komarechka," he said. "I didn't believe that his photos were real."
So Persoff reached out to Komarechka, who soon became his mentor.
"The closer you look, the more there is to see," said Komarechka, who uses a wool mitten to catch snowflakes for photos. Komarechka outlines this technique in his book, "Sky Crystals: Unraveling the Mysteries of Snowflakes."
Eventually, Persoff developed a similar technique to capture snowflakes. His backyard doubling as his studio, he'll use a black wool sock to gently catch the snowflakes as they float down and quickly snap a picture, creating detailed portraits of the crystalized ice with a contrasting dark background.
"As far as people that have tried to recreate the process that I outlined in that book, I believe Jason is one of -- if not the best -- to kind of take that, to pick the reins and gallop away with that technique," Komarechka said. "It's really great to see his work, and he's had a lot of wonderful successes with it."
Like fingerprints, each snowflake is unique because of the different micro-environments it encounters as it drifts to Earth. To Persoff, it's as if he's listening to the snowflake's story when he photographs one.
"It's really fun to see each snowflake's story, whether it merged with another snowflake, or whether the environment was so different on different sides of the snowflake that you get this really asymmetric monster, whether it's really large and complex, or very simple," he said.
Persoff's interest in weather is closely related to his passion for medical science, often drawing comparisons to storm structures and human anatomy -- each a series of systems with forms and functions, he said. For both, he uses the clues from the systems to understand what's happening.
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"When I'm working with the patient, there's this emotional connection that I have with the patient to understand whatever crisis they're going through and to try and help diagnose that," he said. "With the storm, it's a different emotional connection. It's one with my higher power and the magnificence of the rules the universe by which these storms obey. It's just a remarkably amazing experience."
His experience storm chasing has impacted his work in the medical field as well. Before graduating from medical school, he worked as an EMT in Boulder. While he enjoyed emergency medicine, he found himself more interested in internal medicine. But, that "disaster kind of mentality" never left him.
"I became sort of a funny guy down in the ER who liked to play ER doctor, but was actually an internist," he joked.
His perspective shifted after witnessing the 2011 Joplin, Mo., tornado, which would become the deadliest tornado in modern history after claiming 161 lives. At the time, he was with a group of chasers, including another physician.
As the massive tornado tore through the town of about 50,000, the chasers learned that one of the town's two hospitals was destroyed. Shocked, Persoff and the other physician jumped into action.
"It became clear that there are ways that hospital medicine needed to help the ER, the surgeons, the ICUs with disasters, and it changed my life and my focus," he said.
"Since then, I have become a leader in emergency preparedness and disaster response at the national and international level to try and continue to solve these problems."
Now, Persoff works as the assistant director of emergency preparedness at University of Colorado Hospital. And, while he didn't realize it at the time, that experience prepared him for the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Preparing for these adverse events and learning how to help others mitigate disaster, such as the flooding that just happened in North Carolina, that's part of my passion, and ingrained in my DNA," he said.
With so many hats to wear, how does he balance it all? Well, his family has limited him to one hobby per season.
"They can be very expensive hobbies and photographic equipment," joked his wife.
But Irma Persoff emphasizes the mental health benefit that connecting with nature has for her husband -- especially when working during the pandemic.
"Going through the pandemic as a care provider, that was really rough. He couldn't chase that year, so having that community and having, sort of that natural escape, was really helpful to him," she said.
"It's really his way for a very academic-minded person to reconnect with Earth and with the environment."
And while Irma Persoff has since stopped storm chasing, it has started to become a generational trade, with son Malakai Persoff, 23, who started chasing with his dad nearly a decade ago.
"I really enjoy the setting up part of storm chasing. I know that a lot of other chasers don't really like it, but I like the start of the day -- we're opening up all these weather radar apps and seeing what the cloud patterns look like and the humidity and stuff," Malakai said.
Eventually, Malakai plans to follow in his father's footsteps, planning to keep up by taking a meteorology class , he joked.
As for the "storm doctor," he'll continue to capture these natural wonders for as long as he can.
"For me, it's not even that I'm restless. I'm not. I just, I get one life, so I intend to spend that fulfilling it with as many things that make me happy as possible," he said.