Education Rasmussen was born in
Hutchinson, Kansas to James and Ilse Rasmussen in 1957. His younger brother Neal, a software engineer, is also a
storm chaser and is an accomplished videographer and photographer. Rasmussen's undergraduate
meteorology study was at the
University of Oklahoma (OU) in Norman where he received a B.Sc. in 1980. Here he was introduced to field research under
Howard Bluestein, chasing supercells and tornadoes, and learning about thunderstorm structure and processes. He went on to graduate school at
Texas Tech University (TTU) in Lubbock where he earned a M.Sc. in
atmospheric sciences in 1982. In grad school he developed a reputation as a particularly adept forecaster and interceptor of severe storms and tornadoes and was nicknamed "The Dryline Kid" in reference to the
dry line which initiates isolated storms and attendant tornadoes. His thesis was
The Tulia Outbreak Storm: Mesoscale Evolution and Photogrammetric Analysis. From 1982 to 1984, Rasmussen pursued further postgraduate work at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He worked at W.A.R.N. Inc., Now Weather Inc., WeatherData Inc., and PROFS (which became the
Forecast Systems Laboratory or FSL before that unit was merged into the
Earth System Research Laboratories or ESRL). He finished his Ph.D. at
Colorado State University (CSU) in Ft. Collins in 1992. At CSU he participated in more field work, including researching
squall lines in Australia and his dissertation was titled
Observational and Theoretical Study of Squall Line Evolution. as well as project manager for VORTEX-SE in 2016-2017. In 2015 Rasmussen moved back to
Norman, where he continues this aforementioned work and serves as Program Manager for the
VORTEX-SE project. == See also ==