The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  The most vexing question for Tim, though, is whether what got him here can sustain him, or whether he will need to change. His goals expand after Manchester, as he steps onto the scientific main stage. His drive will keep intensifying in turn, and his determination will continue drawing him closer toward the storm. But as much as he is galvanized by recognition from luminaries like Bedard and Bluestein, it’s also true that he has long been fueled by his role as an outsider. He is brilliant but has long avoided the traditional route. He is confident and a strong leader, but he doesn’t like taking second billing. He admires pedigreed scientists, but he can be thorny and self-conscious in their presence. He works hardest when someone tells him that something can’t be done.

  Now that he has made his name, can he fold himself into the role that the next scientific advance will require?

  * * *

  The first hint of an answer comes nine months after Manchester, when Tim arrives at the Iowa State lab of Professor Bill Gallus, the scientist who had written him off as a “yahoo.” Gallus had cringed initially at the thought of collaborating with Tim: He’s a chaser, not a scientist. But Gallus’s engineers have continued to hound him about the blind spot in his simulator. “Could this be the guy who has the data we need?” they ask. As news of Tim’s incredible measurement races through the research community, eventually Gallus gives in. What other choice does he have? There’s only one ground-level data set from the core of a violent twister in existence, and it belongs to Samaras.

  As Tim walks into Gallus’s simulator facility in Ames, Iowa, the professor is nervous. He’s preemptively embarrassed for Tim, worried that this hobbyist will be out of his depth among the engineers and the arcane language of aerospace and fluid dynamics. How is this going to work? Gallus wonders. Alternatively, what if Tim sees the simulator as a “hokey little toy” in comparison to the battle-tested turtle? In either case, this meeting could be a disaster.

  But once again, Gallus has underestimated Tim. Far from floundering, he is positively bursting with insight. To the shock of Gallus’s lab, Tim is an engineer. He speaks the language, and what’s more, he’s entranced by Iowa State’s mighty machine.

  The first time Gallus cranks up the simulator, the look on Tim’s face is one of utter enchantment, “like a kid in a candy store.” He marvels at how much the vortex resembles the Manchester monster. The way the dry-ice clouds feed into the vortex at lower levels, it’s as if he’s been transported back to a dirt road on the South Dakota plains.

  “Can I put my probe in the path of your tornado?” he asks.

  The engineers are chagrined. The minor winds produced by their artificial twister might register as only the most meager blip on HITPR. But Tim insists. He hauls out a turtle and places it onto the platform beneath the simulator. As the fan roars to life and the vaporous vortex translates over the loud-orange cone, Tim is ecstatic. The pressure fall is minuscule next to that of Manchester—about three millibars compared to one hundred—but its contours are eerily similar.

  Over the course of the meeting Gallus’s concerns about Tim’s competency are thoroughly put to rest. Both come to appreciate the other’s strengths—and in the presence of Iowa State’s undulating dry-ice tornado, a partnership is forged. Gallus sets to writing a grant proposal to NOAA to fund Tim’s probe-fielding attempts. In exchange, Tim will feed Gallus more raw data from real-life tornadoes. Tim’s Manchester data set will allow Gallus to finalize his simulator, and in the coming years it will be used to better understand the complex interactions between structures and tornadic wind fields. As Tim gathers further data, it will serve as the foundation for numerical models that explain the anatomy of all manner of vortices chasers see in the field.

  Tim’s agreement with Gallus is promising, but in some ways it also underscores the handicap of Tim’s background. It is unlikely Tim will ever secure a federal research grant on his own. A National Science Foundation reviewer would “shoot him down,” Gallus says, based not on the relative strength of his ideas and abilities, but on the weakness of his academic pedigree. It’s a fateful truth about Tim’s new position. The closer one gets to the exclusive club at the top of the field, the more one is judged, as Julian Lee puts it, by “the number of letters you have after your name.” Tim has little choice but to rely on others for funding.

  Yet even in academia, Gallus is facing limitations of his own: the pool of money for tornado research is shallow these days, and there are bigger fish ahead of him. Between what Gallus can provide and a new round of funding from NatGeo, Tim’s expenses will be largely covered for the upcoming season, but he’ll be working for free. Paid vacation from ARA will only get him so far before company policy requires that he take an unpaid leave of absence.

  Tim wants more than just to scrape by post-Manchester. It’s not just about the thrill of the chase anymore. He wants to build a base of knowledge that can leapfrog structural engineers forward, that can tamp down the death and destruction caused by tornadoes. For his mighty ambitions, he will need a high-profile partner, one with resources. Look at what he’s done without them. Imagine what we could do together, he wants to shout. Tim is already making his next moves. He is working on a new probe—larger than HITPR but just as durable, containing seven video cameras that can record simultaneously. Tim calls it the media probe. Six lateral cameras peer through apertures from behind Lexan screens. The seventh is angled vertically. Not only could the probe provide an unparalleled glimpse of the tornado core, it could, by tracking debris across multiple lenses, yield an even more accurate estimate of the tornado core flow than Tim’s turtle.

  In the late spring of 2004, near Storm Lake, Iowa, Tim succeeds in placing a prototype media probe inside an F3 tornado. The camera peers into an inhospitable place in which seemingly every centimeter of air boils with grass and soil and even larger objects, including a corn bin. The sound of it is like the crowning of a forest fire.

  Just a year after his one-of-a-kind data, he has landed another tornado core and gathered one-of-a-kind footage. Tim’s successes are coming in quick succession now. His name is on the lips of every active storm researcher.

  * * *

  It isn’t long before one of the field’s biggest whales, Josh Wurman, founder of the Center for Severe Weather Research, reaches out to Tim. The two had worked together briefly to analyze the Stratford tornado a couple of years back, and Tim knows Wurman’s reputation well. The senior scientist is one of the perennial players in tornado research, reliably on the receiving end any time research dollars are on the line. After earning his doctorate at MIT, Wurman constructed the first ground-based, mobile Doppler platform in 1994, enabling him to haul a radar as powerful as any research installation’s out into the field, where it’s needed most. His Doppler on Wheels (or DOW) and similar mobile Dopplers developed by Howie Bluestein and others revealed things no weather-service radar had ever successfully imaged before. Wurman, for instance, holds the record for the fastest tornado wind speed ever captured, at 301 miles per hour.

  Yet as much as mobile Doppler has offered, Wurman knows all too well that new angles on the tornado are needed for the full picture to come together. Chief among those is the near-surface level. Here, Tim is not just the leader. He is, Wurman says, “the only serious player.”

  That’s why Wurman approaches him prior to the 2005 season. Wurman is in the early planning stages for what will become the largest tornado-research project ever mounted. VORTEX2 will be the successor to the original project VORTEX (the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment), the sprawling science expedition that operated for two seasons back in the midnineties. This one will be even more ambitious, a historic expedition that seeks to answer the fundamental questions that continue to confound the meteorological world into the twenty-first century.

  Ground-based, mobile Doppler radar was embryonic during the first experiment; the technology has since improved dramatically. Wurman envisions a fleet of mesonets and mobile
radars encircling the storm, gathering data from all angles and elevations. Crucially, he shares Tim’s conviction that unless scientists understand the characteristics of the low-level wind flow in tornadoes, we’ll be powerless to guard against them or to create houses and buildings that can stand in the storm. This will require an all-important set of probes rugged enough to survive the worst tornadoes imaginable.

  Wurman tells Tim that he’s the best man for designing and placing the mission’s probes.

  What Wurman is offering is exactly what Tim needs after Manchester: the opportunity to work hand in glove with top researchers; generous federal funding throughout; a mission whose ambitions are as large as his own; and a perfect chance to build upon his breakthrough. This is the next peak that Tim has been eyeing. It seems as though it should be an easy yes from him.

  But as Tim and Wurman get down to talking, something strange happens. A rift forms.

  More often than not, Tim is, in the words of Julian Lee, “reverential toward academics, perhaps because he himself did not have the opportunity to pursue a formal higher education path.” But there’s a flip side to this reverence—Tim’s pride despite his lack of degrees. When his work is challenged by decorated figures, he can easily turn cagey and defensive. This doesn’t mesh well with Wurman. The scientist is blunt, and his bedside manner has never been honey dipped.

  Also, unbeknownst to Wurman, Tim is already primed to be wary. While the two had collaborated once in the past—coauthoring a conference paper that combined their data on the Stratford, Texas, tornado—Tim was irked by what he perceived as the minor billing his deployment received. As Tim saw things, Wurman treated the turtle as a curiosity whose only purpose was to validate the Doppler on Wheels. Tim wrote to a colleague, “He’s used my data with little/no mention of my efforts, and used it as a tool to promote his efforts against the other mobile radars out there.”

  Wurman says Tim never expressed these feelings to him after the publication of their paper, but he confirms that he saw radar as a more important tool than the in-situ probe.

  Tim must have sensed Wurman’s perception of the pecking order, and his place in it. Their history left Tim feeling “stepped on,” he writes in an email. Which he might be able to get past. But as Wurman gets into the weeds, he doesn’t succeed in alleviating Tim’s concerns. Wurman tells Tim that he isn’t interested in HITPRs for VORTEX2; instead, he’s looking for Tim to invent cheaper, mass-produced versions of the turtle that can measure wind speed directly. As an inventor himself, Wurman admires the pressure-logging turtle and the elegance of its instrument package. “The thing is,” he says, pressure “is the measurement we least care about. We know the pressure is low in a tornado.”

  What we don’t know, Wurman says, is how the tornado’s strongest winds are distributed near the ground. To that end, he doesn’t want to settle for deploying—and landing—just one or two probes per intercept. “These onesie measurements,” he says, “tend not to be too useful.” Instead, he wants a swarm of probes, to capture the strengthening and slackening wind profile of the storm. If Tim’s HITPR is a Lamborghini, Wurman is asking him to assemble a fleet of wind-speed-measuring Chevrolets.

  The conversation rubs Tim the wrong way. But the long-term benefits of working with Wurman are impossible to ignore. Despite his reservations, Tim submits a one-page letter of intent to join VORTEX2 on December 3, 2004. He outlines his potential contributions, including his HITPRs and the new media probe, which should be usable to measure wind speed through the right calculations—but he doesn’t mention any new Chevy probes.

  In January, he discovers that Wurman has submitted his own letter of intent, which also includes a planned instrument with cameras, what he calls a pod. This sets off alarm bells in Tim’s mind. Right or wrong, he’s convinced that Wurman’s “video pod” is an attempt to outflank the media probe and to underbid Tim’s own proposal. Tim fires off an email to a colleague: “Being that Wurman is on the [VORTEX2] board [one of six] he was able to look at my submitted one-pager, and responded with a one-pager of his own describing HIS version of massive video probes . . . undercutting my cost.” Already suspicious, Tim is now fully spooked. “Did I mention that he was on the V-II board reviewing all the submitted one-pagers?”

  For Tim, this is the final straw.

  Wurman dismisses the idea that he has undercut Tim’s proposal; he’s simply filling in the gaps Tim wouldn’t. For now, it ends up being a moot point anyway: VORTEX2 needs to be pushed back, as NOAA and the National Science Foundation decline to fund the expedition for the time being.

  Regardless, Tim’s position stiffens. He comes to reject Wurman’s criticisms along with the allure of his offer. As Tim sees it, he has a formula that’s been successful. Who else has gotten probes into a tornado? And it has worked with the devices he has in hand, without any higher-up ordering him around. He has been told before that his methods would fail, and the doubters were wrong. He has been told before that he won’t be able to make it as an outsider. But that’s exactly how he has gotten by.

  Tim took a chance at Manchester. He left behind the smooth, easy pavement of the highway and picked up a muddy gravel road. He made a bet on his own ability, on his wiles, on his force of will. And it paid off.

  Now, he decides to make the same bet again. If he’s not fit for Wurman’s project, to hell with it. Tim will take inspiration from VORTEX2 and adapt it to his own strengths. He will make his own team—agile, wily, with Tim guiding its movements and his own deployments. He’ll create a rival to VORTEX2 and the club of elite meteorologists.

  This is his gravel-road option. He decides he doesn’t need to fold himself into anyone else’s system. He’ll head off the storm’s greatest mysteries using a route that no one else would dare take.

  Tim leaves the easy road and crosses over into the mud. He slams the gas and doesn’t look back. The decision to spurn Wurman seems small at the time—but its consequences will feed and spiral.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  * * *

  A TEAM OF UPSTARTS

  IN 2005, TIM starts bringing together his collaborators. He’s looking for scientists whose mission complements his own, who are tackling questions he and his turtles can’t address alone. Their combined efforts will create a full picture of a tornado, inside the core and out. If VORTEX2 can leverage repeat measurements of the complete tornadic environment to resolve questions that have long stumped researchers, so can Tim’s mission. Throughout the spring, a first-rate scientific team emerges, with a distinctly Samaras character: trim, dedicated, tight-knit, and with a bit of a chip on its shoulder.

  First and foremost, Tim has in mind a woman he met last year. In April 2004, he had been scheduled to speak at NOAA’s Northern Plains Convective Workshop in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. During dinner after the first day’s presentations, he ended up sitting next to Cathy Finley, a kindred spirit who ran a tornado-research program with her partner, a scientist named Bruce Lee. As she explained to Tim, their data-gathering strategy was to sample the near-tornado environment by surrounding the funnel with sedan-mounted weather stations called mobile mesonets. Tim had listened raptly. Their team sounded a great deal like his own efforts—nimble, independent, unafraid to venture beneath the shadow of the mesocyclone. This was a woman after his own heart.

  Her career trajectory had lately taken an unforeseen turn, she explained. She and Lee had recently resigned from the University of Northern Colorado, having grown weary of fighting the administration for every dollar the school’s small meteorology department deserved. Since then, they’d been working in the private sector, with a company in Minnesota. Wind farms and solar arrays, as it turned out, were in desperate need of meteorological advice. Both she and Lee had been raised in the state, which made this a welcome homecoming as well.

  Throughout, neither of them had given up on their first love: severe storms. Finley grew up in Benson, a small farming hamlet situated along the Chippewa River, not twenty miles from
the South Dakota border. As a little girl, she had been frightened by thunder. But as she grew older, the thing she feared most came to fascinate her. It would ever more be a prime focus of her life.

  As they chatted over dinner, Tim and Finley discovered they had much in common. Conducting hard research while earning a living in the private sector, they agreed, was a struggle without end. As talk turned to Manchester, they realized their paths had nearly crossed at Harold’s farmstead. While Tim was pulling up to what remained of the house, Finley and Lee were just leaving. In fact, one of their students had nearly stepped on the turtle. At the close of the 2004 conference, Tim and Finley had bade each other a fond farewell.

  Now, more than a year later, their conversation remains lodged in Tim’s mind. In mid-2005, he decides to hunt down her contact information. He writes to ask whether she and Bruce Lee would be interested in a joint field operation. Perhaps, he suggests, they should start their own “mini-VORTEX project” during the 2006 season.

  Collaborating with Lee and Finley is an ideal fit for Tim. Their missions are parallel and complementary, affording Tim all the benefits of working with scientists as astute as Wurman, but without sacrificing his autonomy. Furthermore, Julian Lee has now moved on from ARA, so Tim needs someone to do the complex math and draw scientific conclusions from his data.