The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  The federal government ultimately declines to fund a full seismic tornado-detection network, concluding that radar’s early-warning capabilities are superior. Nevertheless, Tim can’t help notice that Tatom had enticed the government to pay for the development of his dream instrument. What is stopping Tim from creating one of his own—a different device capable of prying loose the secrets his inquisitive mind has sought over countless miles of plains highway?

  Tim knows that for all the work that went into the landmark TOTO project a decade before—and for all the people it inspired, from Tim himself to the scriptwriters behind Twister—the storm scientists in charge never actually succeeded in getting a direct hit with their probe. They failed to pierce the tornado core, and no one has succeeded since. Their dream of seeing into the heart of the tornado was never realized.

  In Tim’s mind, if their failure has proven anything, it is that the field could use an engineer’s touch. The TOTO probe looked like an oil drum and weighed about as much as a full one. The snail’s largest component is an actual aluminum sink basin.

  Field science deserves a better probe. Tim is now awakened to the possibility that he might be the guy who can build it. More than that, he thinks he could be the one to get it inside a tornado. It’s the kind of pipe dream that your average chaser might alight on in a moment of inspiration and then let smolder and fade.

  That’s not Tim, though. The laboratory at work is brimming with the right technology. He has already learned how to measure the blast wave of an explosion. What’s so different about the wind? In fact, he realizes he’s been training to build just such a device since he was a little boy, hunched over old radios in his bedroom. The question isn’t “Am I capable?” The question is “What should I build?”

  The answer arrives in 1998 in the form of an announcement in Commerce Business Daily, a clearinghouse for government contracts. Tim’s eyes skim over the page in the course of his work. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is seeking proposals for the development of a hardened instrument capable of obtaining measurements from inside tornadoes. This is it. With just a few column inches of print, NOAA has handed Tim the very pursuit he was looking for. It’s the project of his lifetime. The scientists who wrote this notice don’t know it yet, but Tim Samaras of Lakewood, Colorado—a guy who, in his words, “blows shit up for a living”—is the chaser-engineer they seek.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  CATCHING THE TORNADO

  BY TAKING UP a task that seems like such a serendipitously good fit for a man with Tim’s background, he’s in fact taking up a mantle with decades of portentous history. If anything, building a device that can survive the obliterating tornado core—much less placing it there—is like walking up to Excalibur, plunged deep in stone, and giving it a hearty tug. Many have tried. All have failed.

  If he knew in advance just how difficult it would be to take on the Black Wind—and how impossible it has been for his predecessors—he might think twice. To chase and watch is one thing. If you seek no answers, you court little danger. But prying open the tornado’s secrets is an altogether different endeavor.

  Every fleck of insight science has gained into massive thunderstorms and tornadoes has been hard-won. Even seventy-five years ago, during the Second World War, as humanity was unlocking the inner workings of the atom, tornadoes were still considered nigh unknowable. That people like Tim can now, with a little luck, occasionally predict, track, and chase them is a testament to the line of tenacious researchers who refused to look at the storm and accept it as inscrutable. At each stage, researchers have had to chip at the limits of our understanding one basic question at a time—What is a thunderstorm? When can a tornado form? Can we ever hope to predict where it will strike? Every answer has revealed a more astonishing, more complex presence on the other side than its investigators could have expected. The tornado has proven a foe as worthy and wily as any fabled monster.

  Now Tim hopes to join the lineage of those who’ve stolen away with its secrets. For all he knows—about chasing, about TOTO’s failings, about how to quantify extreme force—he still can’t make out the full shape of the undertaking before him. To grasp the sheer enormity of the quest he has chosen, and the foe he will face, requires understanding Tim’s predecessors, and the story of their fight to lure tornadoes out into the realm of the known.

  * * *

  Well into the twentieth century, the tornado still resided more firmly in the world of myth than reality. Towns in Tornado Alley seldom saw the vortex coming until it was already at the door, and survivors rarely even had the language necessary to describe the malign force they’d witnessed. Those who emerged from the worst modern tornado disaster, a 1925 monster that left a three-state trail of destruction, could only report that the culprit was a “smoky fog” or a fell “blackness” that had descended upon their towns.

  Until the early 1950s, official policy forbade even the utterance of the word tornado in weather forecasts. The government was convinced that citizens were no more sensible than stampeding cattle, that entire cities would descend into hysteria upon hearing the dread word, resulting in far more fatalities than the thing itself. Tornado was a word of power: deadly if spoken; deadly if left unspoken. Better to leave it unsaid, decided the US Army Signal Services, and later the US Weather Bureau, since few within their ranks believed tornadoes were actually predictable. The forces causing the winds to coalesce were shrugged off as the acts of a jealous God. All that meteorologists could do was catalog their epidemiological particulars: deaths, injuries, property damaged.

  It took two freak storms—at Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City, both striking within days of each other in 1948—to shake the institutional opposition to tornado forecasts. The first was an utter shock, unforeseen, smashing thirty-two of the Air Force’s most advanced aircraft at a cost of more than $100 million in today’s dollars. Five days later, two weather officers noticed that the morning’s atmospheric conditions bore an uncanny resemblance to those presaging the storm that had just ravaged the base. Despite the one-in-a-billion odds of two tornadoes striking the same spot within a week, the officers issued the first-ever operational tornado watch. They would be on the chopping block if proven wrong. But then, just after 6:00 p.m., a “yellowish” vortex like a giant “radish” dropped down and swept across the runways. The officers’ prediction saved Tinker millions of dollars in salvaged military hardware, and it offered the first glimpse of a pattern.

  Even so, progress was sluggish. The first civilian tornado “bulletins” wouldn’t be issued until four years later, in 1952, and few subsequent forecasts would speak of tornadoes. Why risk career suicide by attempting to predict such a fickle event? Those warnings that were issued were often inaccurate or unreliable, just as meteorologists had long feared. The areas encompassed by any given watch were so vast as to be nearly useless—a parallelogram- or trapezoid-shaped bulletin zone of some 38,000 square miles. Forecasters simply did not know enough about how tornadoes formed to issue any more specific or accurate warnings.

  In 1951, the Weather Bureau finally set out to solve the problem. They launched the first coordinated effort to understand the cause of tornadoes, the aptly named Tornado Project, which would run through 1953. The bureau constructed a network of instrument stations, called a mesonet, throughout Kansas and Oklahoma, attempting to log the atmospheric conditions preceding and surrounding tornadoes. But over the course of the project, researchers learned precious little about the nature of the tornado. Twisters seemed to be utterly repelled by the network. Even trained scientists couldn’t resist imbuing the storms with anthropomorphic caprice. “Unfortunately for meteorological knowledge,” the project’s leader drily joked, “the setting up of the Tornado Project system seems to have provided the people of Kansas with the best tornado insurance they ever had.”

  This first effort set forth a theme that would repeat time and again in the history of tornado research. To
rnadoes were the essence of ephemera, often so brief and random that it was as if they conspired to keep their own secrets. From the 1950s to the present, those who have tilted headlong after the vortex itself have, more often than not, caught nothing but air. Fate has instead rewarded those who have been more circumspect, targeting the larger storm or paying no mind to the vortex at all.

  Tornado science has proceeded from broad to small, from common to rare. First the thunderstorm was charted and explored; next came the supercell, the specific variety of storm that tends to spin off twisters; only once those two were plumbed did the vortex begin to shed its mystique. From stratosphere to surface level, science would march down the scale. Only at its lowest levels—where Tim has set his sights—does it continue to fend off all comers.

  * * *

  Every tornado is spawned by a thunderstorm, those mammoth atmospheric engines that roar and spark and race across the plains, occasionally channeling their full wrath down upon some tiny hamlet in the sea of grain. By deciphering the puzzle of the thunderstorm, researchers would gain their first important toehold toward understanding the tornado.

  Launched in 1945, the Thunderstorm Project, a sister program to the ill-fated Tornado Project, set out to solve another freak weather event that was tormenting the postwar nation. The nascent commercial air industry had just begun to boom, but as it rose, its planes were falling from the sky at astonishing rates. The new craft of choice, the Douglas DC-3, was crashing regularly amid the extreme turbulence of thunderstorms—a rising toll that included one grim disaster that killed a sitting US senator. When Congress called upon the Weather Bureau to stem the crisis, it turned to the esteemed meteorologist Dr. Horace Byers, out of the University of Chicago. And what Byers ultimately discovered would extend well beyond air travel.

  Byers’s ambition was nothing short of mapping the wind. Taking advantage of the nation’s postwar surfeit of pilots and aircraft, he assembled his own fleet of ten Northrup P-61Cs, known as Black Widows. He then retrofitted each plane with sensors to track their encounters with violent air currents, and he prepared them to penetrate storms at five elevations, from 5,000 to 25,000 feet. Stiff-winged “night fighters,” designed for navigating by radar in the pitch dark, the P-61Cs were about as rugged as a plane could get in 1945—and Byers put them through the wringer.

  The fleet intercepted every malicious thunderhead that formed near the bases of operation in Orlando, Florida, and Wilmington, Ohio—no matter how ominous or how riven with lightning. Through the storm seasons of 1946 and 1947, the pilots encountered seventy-six thunderstorms and conducted nearly 1,400 penetrations. The aircraft were struck by lightning and pummeled by hailstones that left three-inch indentations in metal nose cones and cowlings. They were buffeted by extreme updrafts and downdrafts, one of which shoved a P-61C a vertiginous 500 feet earthward in seconds. Yet for all the stomach-pitching turbulence, not a single pilot was lost.

  Through it all, Byers and his team did exactly what he’d hoped—they mapped the storm. To his surprise, he discovered that a thunderstorm was not a solitary, massive edifice, but rather an agglomeration of cells, complete with complex structures and life cycles. It was as if he’d stumbled upon an alien life-form. Up in the clouds—made of clouds—was a being that could grow and divide, feed and die. In his analysis, Byers was able to lay out a model. He charted the set of ethereal ingredients that come together and dissipate with every storm system. And in doing so, he offered science its first step toward being able to know storms and tornadoes as anything but the hand of God.

  Each storm, Byers discovered, results from a confluence of moisture, heat, and lift. Warm air near the earth’s surface is unstable: it wants to expand and to rise. As it ascends, it creates a vertical current called an updraft—which can be boosted by the right winds. The updraft builds over time, conducting a stream of warm air into the cooler, upper layers of the atmosphere. Here it inevitably starts to shed its heat, which causes the updraft’s moisture to condense and create a cloud. One can often see cumulus towers billowing up to the ceiling of the sky just before the storm strikes. If the updraft is strong and the air especially warm and moist, the clouds will keep on rising, higher and higher. But once the force of the updraft can no longer support the weight of the condensing water droplets—what goes up must come down.

  Byers found that a storm cell is like a lung. The updraft is the inhalation. Now comes the blow. All that moisture hurtles down to the surface in the form of rain. Along the way, the rain cools its surroundings, creating a dense flood of descending wind, known as a downdraft. This is the chill you feel at the passage of a storm. This, Byers found, is the windy sledgehammer that was pounding DC-3s out of the sky.

  Within a short time, the frigid outflow marks the beginning of the end of the storm. Lungs can’t inhale and exhale simultaneously. Without the energy source coming from the updraft, the storm devolves into a downpour of wind and rain and soon expires. Byers summed up the progression in a reliable three-stage life cycle: the storm builds slowly as warm air rises; it reaches maturity once the condensation gets too heavy and begins to fall; and it dies once the outflow drowns the updraft.

  For the practical applications of the Thunderstorm Project, Byers was able to prove what Congress had hoped—that a trained pilot and an aircraft equipped with radar could detect and avoid the most treacherous drafts of a storm. Thanks to these intrepid test pilots, death while traveling by commercial air has become most unlikely. But for tornado science, what Byers and his cohort missed was the next leap forward. Within his own data and radar images was a notable exception to Byers’s final rule. There was one rare type of storm that didn’t quickly drown itself out; it could live and feed for hours, traveling far, growing immense. And it was this distinct breed that was the mother of the twister.

  Keith Browning—an English scientist working at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts—was the man who finally discovered and named the supercell. Picking up where Byers and his crew had left off, he succeeded in identifying the essential ingredients of this rare class of storm, allowing us to begin to differentiate the average rainmaker from its destructive doppelgänger.

  Browning’s breakthrough came while he was studying radar imagery from a nasty 1961 tornado near Geary, Oklahoma. He noticed several peculiar attributes of the parent storm. For starters, while a line of storm cells was drifting regularly northeast, the one tornadic cell had cleaved away and was moving obstinately due east. As the other storms unleashed short-lived deluges and promptly dissipated, the lone cell continued to thrive for hours. It was also far larger than the others, standing eye to eye with the cruising altitude of a modern jetliner. More perplexingly, it exhibited a curious structure—a “vault” appeared on radar, a precipitation-free zone soaring high into the heart of the storm. What could possibly explain a persistently dry region within a proven rainmaker?

  Browning found more and more storms with the same features, and he soon developed a theory: The longevity of these storms owed to an updraft on steroids. It was carving out a space in the center of the storm with velocities so intense that rain and hail simply could not fall there. This wasn’t the garden-variety buoyant column of air that would soon drown in the smothering downdraft. Browning’s updraft existed in a state of continuous reconstitution, propagating forward along a stream of buoyant, energy-suffused air like a wave on the surface of the ocean. So long as the energy source remained unobstructed, this “supercell” could conceivably continue to thrive like a perpetual-motion machine. What made the updraft in Browning’s model work was its unique ability to rotate, a quality that Byers had already noticed in some of the strongest storms. The updraft owed its freakish strength and longevity to a confluence of spiraling winds that continuously funneled warm air all the way up to the storm’s highest levels, like a fuel injector.

  The supercell thunderstorm was a complex organism that required an unlikely combination of interdependent element
s brought into just the right alignment. As Browning and others soon realized, nowhere else on earth do these elements seem to come together as in the North American plains. It isn’t just the hot, volatile air or the pressure cooker of the “cap” that turn the Great Plains into Tornado Alley. In the turbulent springtime months, the converging wind currents are coming from different directions, at different elevations, and at different speeds—which makes them prone to generating wind shear and the crucial rotation needed for tornadic storms. With the right winds, Browning saw, supercells pop up all along the dry line. When winds out of the southeast, the southwest, and the west—all at different levels—hit a rising column of warm air, they spin it like a top. The rotating updraft that results, what would become known as a mesocyclone, is a staple of Tornado Alley and the engine of a supercell.

  As a final piece, when the mesocyclone is met by the jet stream, some six miles above the earth, the storm is able to reach its full strength. The powerful upper-level winds, in concert with the tremendous velocities of the mesocyclone, shunt the precipitation away from the throat of the storm, thereby preventing the suffocation that inevitably shortens the lives of common thunderheads. The mesocyclone and jet stream are what allow Browning’s storm vault to form.

  When wind shear, the cap, a powerful jet stream, and volatile quantities of atmospheric instability pile up over the Great Plains, batten down the hatches—the titan of the sky is coming. Unlike its disorganized counterpart, the isolated supercell thunderstorm can swell to immense proportions, measuring miles across. It may contain straight-line winds capable of toppling telephone poles. Its updraft, a screaming hundred-mile-per-hour vertical vent into the atmosphere, can loft and suspend rain particles. These can then freeze and weld together into grapefruit-size hailstones, plummeting to the earth at terminal velocities. And when the rotating updraft reaches all the way down to the surface, the supercell storm has the power to summon forth the most destructive phenomenon of all, the Black Wind.