The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  Partnership makes perfect sense to Lee and Finley as well. In an intensely clubby field, where egos swell, here is a man they can work with. The researchers are tackling the storm on different scales, but they’re pieces of the same puzzle. Tim is attempting to draw out the inner workings of the tornado and how it behaves at ground level. Lee and Finley are trying to figure out what creates the tornado. What sustains it? What kills it off? What supercharges it? The answers to these questions could one day aid forecasters, while Tim’s work could help vortex modelers and structural engineers. Both prongs cover some of the most vexing mysteries left in storm science. Together, they form a complete package.

  Like Tim’s rotating cast of chasers, Lee and Finley’s is a humble outfit. Their toolbox consists of three mobile mesonets—atmospheric-sensor racks that look as though someone tore the plumbing out of the kitchen sink and strapped it to the top of a sedan. The largest component is a doglegging section of PVC pipe that ingests air past a thermometer and hygrometer (used to measure relative humidity), before exhausting it out the other end with a fan. At the top of the rack, an anemometer angles into the wind like a propellered weather vane, tracking wind speed. The whole rig—like a giant tongue used to savor different characteristics in the air—is secured to a sturdy Yakima bike rack, mounted to the top of a Chevy Cobalt, favored by Lee and Finley because it’s one of the cheapest sedans on the market. The mesonet racks, unlike HITPR, are hardly exemplars of cutting-edge engineering. They’re composed of common research-grade weather gauges.

  But it is not the ingenuity of the tool, in this instance, that makes or breaks a deployment. It’s execution, timing, and focus; the right mesonet spacing and coordination can offer whole new dimensions of data on a tornado. They can’t tackle whole storms like the research groups supplied with millions of federal dollars. Instead, they’ve taken on a narrower slice.

  What fascinates Finley and Lee most is a second downdraft that forms when the prevailing winds, roughly four miles above the surface, slam into the rear flank of the mesocyclone and are forced violently downward. Known as the rear-flank downdraft (RFD), this current of wind hurtling toward the surface is both drier and warmer than a normal, rain-filled downdraft. The phenomenon—the focus of Finley’s dissertation at Colorado State University—has drawn in both Finley and Lee because RFD surges seem to correlate with tornado formation, and they likewise seem to be associated with intensification. They could be the accelerant thrown onto the fire, transforming strong tornadoes into beasts like at Manchester. But they’re still poorly understood.

  “It turned out to be a really big issue in the field,” Lee says. “In terms of cost-benefit ratio, we got a lot of benefit out of a small budget.” Even so, they’ll need many more chases, and many more data sets. Repetition is what it’ll take to pin down whether the RFD is indeed what’s driving formation or intensification. “People think it’s easy to get these measurements, but it’s actually quite difficult,” Lee says. “That’s why you have to do it for a lot of years and accumulate enough cases to make generalizations. You get snippets of data. Or the road network might preclude you from positioning where you need to be. The storm may not cooperate. It takes a long time to collect enough data to say something.”

  Tim sympathizes with their plight. Manchester was a groundbreaking achievement, but he too needs to build up a larger data set before his work will translate that into real progress for people who are caught in the path of the storm. The arrival of Lee and Finley into his life must feel like salvation. Not only do they understand, they are living his experience, his frustrations—they’re fellow travelers along the same path.

  Truth be told, what excites Finley most about partnering with Tim is the prospect of strapping a mesonet rack to the top of his chase vehicle. He ventures into regions of the storm that scare her and just about every other researcher in the field. “Nobody collects data there,” Finley jokes, “unless it’s by accident.”

  * * *

  Bill Gallus, the Iowa State professor, is the next addition to the team. He and Tim have been collaborating on probe data successfully for over a year, and it’s an easy decision for Gallus to stay on. He now agrees to supply Lee and Finley with apprentices and mesonet drivers, drawing on his ranks of eager graduate students.

  The other permanent member of Tim’s squadron is a chase partner named Carl Young, whose obsession might burn even more brightly than Tim’s. A University of Nevada at Reno grad student, Young conducted the environmental analysis of the Manchester tornado and has lately become a fixture at Tim’s side.

  Both a talented forecaster and a hardened road warrior, he’s the only chaser Tim has hunted with who can match his legendary stamina. They met at a meteorological conference in 2002, and it was Tim who encouraged Carl to focus his graduate studies on the near-surface tornado environment.

  Carl was raised on the West Coast and had tried his hand at a number of odd jobs—an economics major turned insurance-claims agent turned wedding photographer. He even gave acting a shot, though his only significant appearance was a brief part in the 1997 film Against the Law, starring Richard Grieco and Nancy Allen. Carl’s character was killed in the climactic scene, and it soon became clear that his acting career wasn’t going to survive either.

  His life rounded another corner in 1998, just shy of his thirtieth birthday, when he was involved in a terrifying car accident. The experience impressed upon Carl the fragility of his life and prompted him to leave California, heading east. As a boy, he had loved to watch the summer thunderstorms whip whitecaps on Lake Tahoe. And as he recovered from his injuries and began his life again, he had a newfound urge to see the real monsters out on the Great Plains. Over the course of two months he logged 25,000 miles, chasing storms up and down Tornado Alley, and as far afield as the East Coast. In the days before smartphones, he’d call his father and ask for updates from the Storm Prediction Center, or for the shape of the supercell on radar. His constant refrain was “Do you see a hook [echo]? Do you see a hook?”—the telltale sign of a supercell with tornadic potential.

  Young returned to Lake Tahoe after that summer a changed man. Weather, he determined, would become the focus of his life. He enrolled in Lake Tahoe Community College to get his prerequisite courses out of the way, then was accepted to a master’s atmospheric science program at the University of Nevada, Reno. His professors soon discovered their student was a fanatical storm chaser. Come May, he had his priorities, and he struggled mightily when final exams conflicted with the peak of tornado season.

  Carl had no interest in being cooped up in a lab, it turned out. The real science was outside, to be seen and felt and smelled and heard. Storms left room for precious little else in his life. He taught a few meteorology classes at the community college in the off-season and served briefly as the program director for the environmental organization League to Save Lake Tahoe. The position, however, quickly became untenable due to his lengthy absences during tornado season.

  In 2002, he was awarded a $15,000 Sierra Pacific Power Company fellowship to further his field research into severe storms and tornadoes. It was in this milieu of chasers and geeks that he met Tim Samaras. Perhaps obsession recognized obsession. From then on, seldom would one find Tim beneath a mesocyclone without Carl.

  * * *

  As Tim fills out the roster of his team, Anton Seimon, his old chase partner, is frankly relieved to see him prepare an expedition with a group of trained meteorologists and scientists. “Carl is a very good forecaster, and a clear thinker. The people he worked with before Carl, to put it bluntly, were his next-door neighbor and brother-in-law, or anybody willing to drive a car,” Seimon says. “What business they had getting in front of tornadoes is an open question.”

  Between Carl Young, Cathy Finley, Bruce Lee, and Bill Gallus, Tim has a formidable reservoir of talent. If Lee and Finley can sample the rear-flank downdraft while Tim and Carl pierce the vortex with turtles and media probes, their team could pull of
f a scientific coup that vastly exceeds their modest number.

  Tim has dreamed of collaborating with great minds, and now he has found his crew. The days of vanishing into the plains with nothing but a friend, a minivan, and a few turtles are over. It is decided: 2006 will constitute a sort of trial run, to ensure they have the right chemistry. Come 2007, the inaugural season will commence.

  * * *

  As new collaborators and chase companions drift into Tim’s orbit, drawn by a shared worship of the sky, 2006 brings a connection of an altogether different sort—a surprise not even the savvy forecaster could see coming over the horizon.

  On March 24, 2006, Tim watches a twenty-eight-year-old Iowan named Matt Winter enter the banquet hall of the West Des Moines Marriott. Winter and his mother thread through the crowd of chasers and meteorologists at the 10th Annual Severe Storms and Doppler Radar Conference, looking slightly lost. In this crowd, Tim can see that Winter, who works in compliance for an online job board, is a little out of place. What the young man knows of meteorology has been gleaned from a few books, mostly chaser memoirs and beginner’s texts. He considers himself more of an armchair enthusiast, content to follow the exploits of his favorite chasers, and to track tornadic events from the safety of his computer or television. Tim is one of the chasers he’s most enamored of.

  Winter’s mother, Sherry, had previously arranged with Tim for her son to attend the conference and meet him. Long before Tim had settled down with Kathy, he and Sherry had been sweethearts, though it has been decades since they last saw each other. After Tim had secured invitations for them, the young man reached out by email, just to introduce himself. Tim had asked if Winter was a chaser or a meteorologist, or if he had attended Iowa State. Winter explained that he wasn’t a chaser, though he’d been fascinated by weather ever since he was six, when he watched as a massive storm’s eighty-five-mile-per-hour winds blew down trees in his babysitter’s neighborhood. Like Tim, Winter did not have a college degree. The young man had started a family. He wrote that he had three children, whom he was raising with his wife, Soun. The conversation never delved any deeper than that, but they resolved to meet in Des Moines.

  At the conference, Tim has only a few minutes before his presentation, but he happily greets Winter and his mother. They make small talk, and Tim promises to give Winter a copy of Driven by Passion, a new compilation DVD of Tim’s best tornado sightings. With that, he makes his way to the stage, and Winter and Sherry take their seats at a table reserved for them near the dais.

  Over the next half hour, Tim rolls video clips, regales the audience with war stories, and flips through carefully composed slides of plains twisters he’d chased during the 2005 season. He is not generally known as a speaker who gets hung up, whose words are punctuated by long, uncomfortable silences. Yet, on several occasions, Tim grows quiet, and his gaze seems to settle on Winter. The young man shifts uncomfortably in his chair.

  Sherry, Tim soon learns, has come to believe something he himself may have begun to realize during his speech, as he peered down from the lectern at Winter’s face. The day after the conference, she tells her son, “The more you got wrapped up in weather and tornadoes, the more I suspected it.” There is a strong possibility, she says, that Tim is his father.

  Tim and Sherry had dated in 1977 when they were both practically kids, around twenty years old. They went on a road trip together to Montana at one point. Then, without warning, she had ended the relationship. She left Colorado “abruptly,” as Tim describes their parting, and returned to Iowa, where she reconnected with the man Winter knows as Dad. Soon, she was pregnant with her first son, Matt. Given the timing, she had always known there was a chance Tim might be the father, but she had hoped, for the sake of her future husband and the life they were trying to make together, that Tim was not. “It was a tiny suspicion,” she had explained to Winter. She had never told Tim until recently.

  Not surprisingly, Winter takes the news hard. Tim is his hero, but he isn’t sure whether he should be thrilled or furious. Soon thereafter, Tim gets in touch. He tells Winter that he intends to purchase a DNA test to find out once and for all whether Sherry’s suspicions are true. The kit arrives in the mail after a few days. In Colorado and Iowa, both men run swabs over the insides of their cheeks and drop the samples in the mail. Less than two weeks later, the results are in: there is a 99.97 percent chance that Tim is his father.

  In Colorado, Tim has been having his own series of surprising conversations with his wife and children, explaining the existence of a son he didn’t know about until recently, by a woman he had dated before Kathy. Apart from being stunned, everyone seems to be taking the news pretty well. When Tim tries to explain this newfound son to his colleagues, he seems a little chagrined. The revelation flies in the face of the image he has cultivated—the squared-away exemplar of the meteorological world whose path kept to an unerring trajectory.

  Tim composes a long email to Winter, explaining the results of the test and its methodology—perhaps to introduce some order to a development neither can control. He writes to say that he understands that Winter is a grown man with his own family: “The DNA test shows I’m your biological father, but I know that doesn’t make me your dad. I know you have a dad. If you want to be friends, or if you want to sever ties, I will understand. I know the circumstances are very hard, but I want you to know that I’m proud and happy to find out that you are my son.”

  They continue to correspond, and before long Tim invites Winter, his wife, and children to Lakewood, to meet the “Samaras clan,” as Tim refers to the extended family. That July, Winter arrives in Colorado with his wife and three children in tow. The young man looks like a bundle of jittery nerves in advance of his crash introduction to a whole new wing of the family. Tim’s brother Jack has flown in from Savannah, Georgia, just to meet Winter; and Tim’s other brother, Jim, will be driving up from Lone Tree, Colorado, with his family. When the Winter clan arrives at Tim’s bungalow, the introductions are dizzying as they meet Samaras after Samaras after Samaras. But soon enough Winter seems to relax.

  While Kathy tends to Winter’s wife and children, Tim shows him around the shop where he builds his gadgets and probes. Tim holds forth about the enormous antenna in his backyard, which he uses as an amplifier for his ham radio, and to scan for signals from outer space. As they stroll around the bungalow, the two men must be searching each other for the their own genetic echoes. Winter doesn’t have Tim’s prominent Greek Albanian nose at first glance. But he did as a child, before a serious car accident forced him to get facial reconstructive surgery that permanently altered his profile. Beyond that, the subtle clues add up. Neither man is particularly tall. Both possess generous plumes of chest hair. There is something to the eyes as well, a certain crystalline intensity. They come to see it, that Winter is Tim’s son.

  The two move on to Tim’s new chasing rig. Gone is the minivan after Manchester, replaced by a vehicle more suited to an adventurer’s hair-raising exploits. The black GMC 4x4 pickup sports a throaty exhaust system and a hail-dimpled paint job. Winter notices there is a gaping hole in the camper top, opened up by a softball-size hailstone. He laughs. “Why haven’t you fixed that?”

  “It’s a war wound,” Tim replies proudly. “You don’t repair those.”

  The next day, Tim takes Winter by Applied Research Associates, so he can see where Tim works. Little by little, he introduces his son to his world. The Samaras clan envelops the Winters as though they are their own. Winter and Paul trade Star Wars references with matching fluency. Tim reads stories to his new seven-year-old grandson, Nick, as the boy sits in his lap and pulls at his eyeglasses. Jack holds the tiny hands of Winter’s year-and-a-half-old daughter, Haley, and helps the wobbling toddler walk across the living-room floor. Before long the kids are calling them Grandpa Tim and Grandma Kathy. That night, they order pizza, and Winter looks on in amazement as Tim and Jenny douse their slices in generous slicks of hot sauce. Winter notes that he
has always seasoned his pizza the same way.

  After three days, Tim and the others bid their visitors good-bye. Tim will see Winter and his family again next year for his fiftieth birthday, when the chaser will whip up a batch of his famed green-chili burritos. Tim speaks of consulting with a geneticist to find out whether a fascination with severe weather is a heritable trait. How else, Tim wonders, to explain Winter’s lifelong curiosity in isolation from his biological father?

  Thereafter, they’ll see each other sporadically. When Tim swings through Des Moines for a conference—or finds himself lured by the promise of an Iowa storm—he’ll often grab breakfast or lunch with Winter. The young man confesses to having difficulty forgiving his mother for keeping her suspicions from him all these years. Tim’s perspective is both measured—How could she have truly known?—and hopeful: “Don’t look at what could have been,” he says. “We need to live in the now. We need to accept it.”

  While the time they’ve lost bothers Winter, Tim assures him that they have the rest of their lives to make up for it. Both men are still young, far from the twilight of their days. Yet, as Tim well knows, even the brightest day can curdle over, plunged deep into shadow by the advance of the storm.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  TWISTEX TAKES THE GRAVEL ROAD

  IN FEBRUARY 2007, after a quiet but successful season for Tim’s new team, Dr. Josh Wurman tries again. He pulls Tim into a quiet room at the Radisson Hotel in Aurora, Colorado, during the 9th Annual National Storm Chaser Convention to deliver big news: VORTEX2 is back on. It has received the green light for two years of generous funding in 2009 and 2010. Nearly every field scientist in the country will be jockeying for a spot in VORTEX2 in the coming months. And Wurman still wants Tim to design the mission’s fleet of wind-speed-measuring probes.