Most people run from violent tornadoes. So-called storm chasers run after them. Tonight "Tech Live" catches up with some of these thrill-seekers.

Martin Lisius is one of the world's premier storm chasers. He runs Tempest Tours, an Arlington, Texas-based company that will take you chasing severe weather.

Lisius captured images of a violent tornado in 1998: Nearly a mile wide, it almost wiped Spencer, South Dakota, off the map, killing six people and injuring a third of the town's 320 residents.

"That's the only tornado that I've intercepted in my life that was killing people at the time that I was viewing it," Lisius said.

But intercepting a tornado like the one that hit Spencer isn't easy. Lisius says the best storm chasers have a nose for tornadoes.

They also have the latest forecasting equipment.

Lisius uses GPS tracking equipment and sophisticated mapping software in his chase vehicles to keep him on course. He also uses cellphones, ham radios, and CBs to keep him connected.

But he also relies on mobile Internet connections and televisions in his vehicles to receive up-to-the-minute information from meteorologists at the National Weather Service.

They use the latest radar technology to gather information about the size, shape, wind speed, and movement of a storm.

Now researchers with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, are building next-generation radar devices from technology used on Navy destroyers.

Douglas Forsyth is chief of the Severe Storms Lab's radar division. He's working on a new radar technology called Phased Array Radar, a system that sends out thousands of radar beams at a time. Today's Doppler radar -- a system that currently gives the public about a 12-minute lead time on approaching storms -- sends out only one beam at a time.

Forsyth says Phased Array Radar could improve that lead-time to as much as 20 minutes.

The Severe Storms Lab also is working with a new severe weather simulator. It's doing for meteorologists what jet simulators do for pilots.

Michael Magsig, a software engineer who does work for the Severe Storms Lab, says the weather simulator will allow forecasters to train like they fight. He says it will allow them to gain experience with the pressures and the equipment they use to issue life-or-death warnings, without the consequences of making mistakes.

The Severe Storms Lab is also experimenting with a new rugged truck designed to take radar into a storm.

It's called SMART, or Shared Mobile Atmospheric Research and Teaching Radar.

Lab researchers say the SMART truck will allow forecasters to see all the way through a hurricane and to look at the front and back sides of storms.

"We may actually be able to do real-time sensing with these things, sort of a mobile observing system for special events, like hurricane landfalls or big severe storm outbreaks and things like that in the future," said senior researcher Louis Wicker.

It's technology that will allow most people to get out of the way of severe weather -- or put severe weather fanatics like Lisius into its path.

"Seeing nature evolve before your eyes -- to see a storm develop from nothing and become this complex, fascinating, well-balanced machine we call a supercell thunderstorm, and then it produces a significant tornado -- is incredible," Lisius said. "It's hard to explain. You have got to see it in person, and I want to see it as many times as possible before I die."