Storm Kings

Creating fearsome weather, indoors.

- Kevin Gray

ON AUGUST DAYS IN THE FLORIDA PANHANDLE, THE TROPICAL heat steam-cooks everything. UPS drivers slap wet bandannas to their foreheads. Pirate-themed mini golf parks, shimmering like mirages, lay deserted. But a few miles from the Gulf motels and sandy beach malls, engineers like Kirk Parrish face the worst snowstorms of their lives. Sheathed in parkas, they cold-start their pickups and drive straight into stinging, minus-40-degree whiteout blizzards. Indoors.

“It’s absolutely crazy seeing an indoor snowstorm,” says Parrish, a diesel engineer at Ford Motor Company whose job is to make sure your F-150 can start and run in Prudhoe Bay extremes. To prove it can, and tweak things if it can’t, he treks each summer to the McKinley Climatic Laboratory at Elgin Air Force Base. Sprawled over several buildings, the lab is the largest indoor-weather testing facility in the world and can conjure nearly any meteorological hazard: ice storms, corrosive fog, driving rains (up to 27  inches per hour), 165-degree heat, jungle humidity, and 40-mile-per-hour sandstorms.