Brandon Clement

At a young age, Brandon Clement, grew up in South Louisiana and was fascinated by weather and more specifically hurricanes. In 1995 at the age of 15 Brandon tracked Hurricane Opal along the Florida Gulf Coast to officially "chase" his first hurricane. As he continued through school he continued to go after regional tropical systems and localized flooding events. In 1997, Brandon moved to central Mississippi where he graduated high school in 1998 and began going to a local community college. Mississippi gets far more tornadoes and more violent, long-lived tornadoes than Louisiana and this quickly grabbed Brandon's attention. In the fall of 1998 a tornado warning prompted faculty at Hinds Community College to herd students in the hallways. Brandon decided that sitting and waiting in a building to get hit by a tornado wasn't for him and he ran out to his car in the parking lot and chased the storm for more than 70 miles. From that point on he let very little get in his way of stormchasing. In 2000, Brandon left college to focus on his successful auto glass company. Owning his own business gave him both the flexibility and financial needs to dedicate more time to storm chasing. Not long after, Brandon met his wife Mandi who also shared his passion for storms. Together they began venturing to the great plains and expanding the area they chased. This continued as the two witnessed many tornadoes, hurricanes and other severe weather events until they had their first child together in 2009 when they agreed it wasn't fair to the child to have both parents frequently chasing storms. The April 27, 2011 Super Outbreak was one of the rare exceptions where they chased together and were able to capture some of the only footage of the Smithville, Ms EF5 tornado. Brandon eventually sold his Auto Glass business and began designing and building custom fountains. It was also during this time he began to shoot a lot more video and began selling it to media organizations. It was at this point where Brandon started thinking about pursuing a career shooting storm video. In 2016 he was contracted by WeatherNationTv to do professional consulting. The very next week he was able to capture tornadoes just about every day with most being significant. Just a couple months later his footage was being shown worldwide in the 2016 Louisiana Flooding. In 2017 Brandon was now working a full time job and chasing relentlessly. It was simply too much for one person and he decided to pursue his passion. He resigned from his job designing and building custom fountains and went full bore into storm videography. In 2017 Brandon founded his company WXchasing which quickly became quite successful as well as became a certified drone pilot. After the longest hurricane drought in USA history, 2017 allowed Brandon to showcase what is his specialty. Hurricanes. During Hurricane Harvey, a night time strengthening category 4 hurricane Brandon rode the storm out from his car in the middle of the highway in Rockport, Tx. His live stream received over 6 million views in a matter of hours and was widely considered one of the most intense live streams ever seen. During the eye of the hurricane, he took the opportunity during the brief calm to shoot damage to the High School. Brandon, WXChasing and Live Storms Media began to rapidly grow at this point showcasing the ability to capture amazing video and get it to the media quickly. Just weeks later, during Hurricane Irma, Brandon was the first person to ever fly a drone in the eye of a hurricane. Shortly after his videos from Maria continued to outpace the competition on a global scale. In 2018, Brandon's videos of the Kilaeua Volcano erupting in Hawaii went viral worldwide. His timelapse of lava consuming a Ford Mustang was one of the most viewed videos on the internet in 2018. Later that year his coverage of Hurricane Michael garnered him even more recognition. In 2019 Brandon became the first person ever to get close range footage of a tornado with a drone as he flew his drone just yards away from a tornado in Oklahoma. Just a month later he was able to do it again near Canton, Tx as he captured a much stronger tornado hitting homes. WXChasing now has over 320k followers and has had more than 125 million minutes of video viewed from the facebook page alone. Between social media platforms, digital, apps and broadcast Brandon's videos have accumulated well over 15 Billion views in the USA alone. In 2019 he started directing and producing a documentary on Hurricane Michael.