The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  Wurman lays out for Tim all the advantages of joining the historic effort. And he is characteristically blunt about Tim’s prospects should he decline to join the fold. “You’re not going to get funding,” he says. “How else are you going to get a real grant to do what you want from somebody other than TV?”

  This is Tim’s final chance to choose Wurman’s path, to avail himself of every resource, every tool he could never afford. He’d be contributing to a mission that not only includes probes and mesonets, but radar trucks, weather-balloon launch vans, unmanned aerial drones, damage surveyors—a diversity of observing platforms that has never before been deployed on tornadic storms. But if he accepts, he’ll be bumped back down to role-player status. It could be 2001 all over again—one head in a much larger herd, swept along wherever it leads.

  As he weighs his options, there’s another argument for Tim to consider, lurking just below the surface. Neither man mentions the prospect of death. But even for someone as skilled as Tim Samaras, there are storms out there that can’t be understood with one’s eyes alone. Mobile-radar technologies aren’t just another way of looking at the storm, they can make operating near tornadoes a great deal safer.

  Tim should be factoring this in.

  Wurman himself is exhibit A, carrying with him a famous story of his own brush with a disastrous storm near Geary, Oklahoma—where his million-dollar machine became an unintentional probe with Wurman and his crew trapped inside.

  It was on May 29, 2004, just west of Oklahoma City. Wurman and his DOW encountered a multiple-vortex mesocyclone, or MVMC—the term Wurman would later coin for a broad tornado containing one or several intense subvortices. He was having trouble figuring out the structure of this storm; it was like a mesocyclone on the ground, streaked with roving pockets of deadly wind. By the time he realized he had ventured too close, it was too late: DOW had entered the main circulation. His vehicle was engulfed by winds so violent that they wrenched a closed door from the frame of the stout truck. Terrifying as it was, this part of the storm was probably survivable. The main circulation appeared to be roughly a mile across; it was the subvortex, though, that worried him. It fluctuated in width from between 200 and 800 meters, raking the prairie in complex cycloidal loops that were difficult to decipher in real time. Only by using the radar images on his screen was Wurman able to get an edge. He called out directions to the driver and was able to evade the subvortex that held the tornado’s strongest winds.

  Without the DOW, Wurman would have been blind. The feed from the nearest weather-service radar might not have picked up the subvortex at all. And even if it could have resolved the structure, by the time the next radar update arrived—usually once every five minutes—it would have been too late. The day might easily have ended differently. “We had our choice of hazard because of the mobile radar data: bad or worse?”

  If Tim joins Wurman, he will have the insurance of DOW’s watchful and all-seeing eye, a crucial fallback tool if he ever strays too close to a storm. Without Wurman, Tim is stuck relying on five-minute radar scans. And then what?

  Tim knows that mobile radar can offer an extra layer of certainty within a storm—he’s had chaser friends who’ve made great use of it. But whether he factors this into his decision in Aurora, we can’t know. What we do know is that Tim remains wary of Wurman, that Tim remembers all too well the agony of 2001, that he ascribes his success in 2003 to his independence, and that his heart is already with the team of obsessives he has strung together.

  When he says no to VORTEX2, Wurman is shocked—but more so, disappointed. “Maybe he thought he was being bullied when we were all in the same room, telling him to do something different,” Wurman says. His warnings—about Tim’s funding and hardware—were well meant, from the scientist’s perspective, even if they failed to land.

  Both parties move on.

  Wurman decides that it’s time to undertake probe construction himself. He’s not the engineering whiz that Tim is, but the in situ model is too important not to follow now that it’s been proven. “I got in the Pod business reluctantly because Tim’s design and strategy didn’t seem likely to answer the scientific questions that needed answering,” Wurman says. He’s hoping that his Doppler on Wheels combined with new in situ pods will allow for a comprehensive, unparalleled map of the vortex.

  Tim and his crew don’t miss a beat. The 2006 test run with Bruce Lee and Cathy Finley performed well, even in a fairly uneventful season. The team formed a budding friendship and spirits were high. In their minds, Wurman and his convoy can take up the whole highway if they like; Tim’s upstarts will stick to the gravel road.

  On April 9, 2007, Tim sends an email to his partners to make the collaboration official. Every research mission should have a name, or at least a tortured acronym, so they decide to christen their creation.

  Bruce and I have been batting around a few terms to use for our fielding this year. This is what we’ve come up with to date:

  Tactical

  Weather

  Instrumented

  Sampling in/near

  Tornadoes

  Basically, “TWIST.”

  TWIST sounds a little truncated to Tim’s ear, and he proposes a slight tweak:

  What do you think about adding the EX (for EXperiment) to arrive at:

  “TWISTEX”?

  They all agree. To Wurman’s VORTEX2, Tim now has the one and only TWISTEX.

  * * *

  The inaugural 2007 season provides an object lesson in the elusory nature of the twister. The first big tornado of the year will surely go down in chaser legend. On May 4, a 1.7-mile-wide EF5 effectively wipes Greensburg, Kansas, from the map—but TWISTEX is nowhere near the action. Lee and Finley’s young mesonet drivers are still buried under final exams. For the remainder of the season, apart from a second EF5 in Manitoba, Canada—where the team doesn’t have approval to operate—no other significant tornadoes touch down in the plains.

  In a last-ditch effort, Tim applies for his own separate VORTEX2 grant, intending to operate independently but within the expedition’s umbrella. But Wurman’s instincts were right; NSF declines to fund Tim’s proposal. Lee and Finley have standing invitations to join VORTEX2 as well. But after working with Tim, they aren’t considering those offers too seriously. It sounds as though they would be expected to pay their own way. And like Tim, they’re now convinced that they will be better off operating independently of VORTEX2.

  At a subsequent American Meteorological Society conference, TWISTEX arrives like the plucky upstart on a bigger gang’s turf. Bill Gallus, the team’s academic partner, remains a little uneasy with the perception that they’ve gone rogue. The rivalry—one-sided though it may be—might as well have been lifted from the script of Twister. As Gallus says, they’re “the little guys with really good ideas, who have the most experience with ground-based deployment.” And, so far, “they get run over by the well-funded VORTEX2 planning people.” But that’s just the setup—who knows whether Wurman’s armada or Tim’s raw drive will triumph in the final act.

  VORTEX2 is about to unleash millions of dollars’ worth of gadgetry on plains storms. The fight might seem unfair, unwinnable on the surface—not even worthy of being called a fight. But if there’s one thing Tim excels at, it’s finding tornadoes. This is where the underdog thinks he can again defy the impossible odds. Because even without DOW to watch over him—even without the unprecedented array of tools at VORTEX2’s disposal—all the equipment in the world means nothing if the scientists wielding them can’t catch the right storm. That’s largely the arc of storm science’s history: researchers trying and repeatedly failing to locate the sky’s most unpredictable phenomenon. If the members of TWISTEX have any small edge, it’s that they all have reputations as road warriors and highly experienced chasers.

  Atmospheric field research is a wide-open frontier, theirs for the claiming. There are only a few mesonet data sets from within close proximity to violent tornadoes in existe
nce. Coincident mesonet and in situ probe data sets are even rarer still. TWISTEX has the opportunity to leverage its chasing skill and agility to drive tornado science into its next golden era.

  Tim is betting that the natural law of inertia will prevail at some crucial moment in the 2009 and 2010 seasons of Wurman’s experiment. Chasing is about being able to turn on a dime. But when a heavy object like VORTEX2 is in motion, it tends to stay in motion. When at rest, the armada will tend to stay at rest.

  That’s when TWISTEX will step up. The game is on.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  QUINTER, KANSAS

  ON MAY 23, 2008, not long after the annual kickoff of TWISTEX operations, the team is tracking a storm bearing down on a small Kansas town called Quinter. After a pair of unusually docile seasons, the project is off to a roaring start this year. Today is gearing up to be the team’s first shot at a monster tornado. It will serve as an initial test of TWISTEX’s cohesion and coordination under stressful, highly dangerous conditions. In equal measure, it’s a test of the gamble Tim made by passing up a berth with VORTEX2.

  From the lead car, known as M1, Bruce Lee and Cathy Finley choreograph the movements of the three mesonets. The convoy proceeds evenly spaced and in single file down straight farm-to-market roads, their roof-mounted mesonet stations cruising above the corn like shark fins.

  If they’re lucky, the stations will sample a cross section of the environment feeding the tornado. And if the weather gods truly smile upon TWISTEX today, a rear-flank downdraft surge will sweep across the cars, its characteristics captured by the dataloggers. Ideally, the tornado at the edge of the surge would pass over one or several of Tim’s turtles and media probes. But first they’ll have to contend with the radios that keep the team in fitful contact, limited Internet connectivity, roads that end abruptly, and storms that seem to resent the prodding of meteorological inquiry.

  To Lee’s and Finley’s mild irritation, the list of obstacles also currently includes Tim and Carl, who have wandered off, gotten separated from the group, and are now irretrievably out of position. If the mesonets do manage to collect a data set this afternoon, they’re unlikely to be bolstered by any probes. It isn’t that they expect Tim to remain within eyesight; his black GMC is autonomous by design, able to venture far closer than the Chevy Cobalt and its four cylinders dare. Yet to Lee and Finley, their data set will be of little value if probe and mesonet don’t deploy on the same tornado. At their best, each informs the data collected by the other. The full team’s data is more valuable than any piece in isolation.

  But M1 can’t worry about that now.

  The mesonets tack north along a sodden dirt road, tires leaving two-track depressions that quickly fill with standing water. To the northwest, a mesocyclone scrapes its belly across the prairie. As they approach a stand of trees, a thin, pearlescent vortex to the northeast terminates in a swirling wreath of dust. It crosses the road ahead, and a fuse or transformer farther down the line explodes in a cold, blue burst of light. When they near the source of the flash, the poles lean ominously overhead.

  Within minutes the thin rope of a tornado swells into a textbook stovepipe, which they easily track over the flat cropland. M1 continues along at a leisurely pace, roughly twenty miles per hour, the optimal speed for gathering data. Apart from the fact that M3 had gotten turned around in Quinter and is lagging behind, M1 and M2 are in ideal formation. All that remains to be done is to keep good spacing and observe.

  The storm, however, is only just baring its teeth. After M1 passes an electrical substation, Lee and Finley are blasted by a 108-mile-per-hour gust. It slams broadside into the sedan in what feels like an intense rear-flank downdraft. Suddenly the tornado they were following disappears. There it was one moment, such a terrible and beautiful thing to behold, tearing down power lines and ripping up crops. The next, it has vanished, like an apparition.

  That probably isn’t good, Lee thinks.

  At this moment, M1 can be seen in a video taken by another chaser named Chris Collura, who is at times no more than fifty yards behind. The tornado is just to the northwest in one instant, and in a blink it’s gone. All that can be heard is a low, moaning westerly wind. There’s a hollow resonance to the sound, as if the empty fields themselves shape its register. What they hear next affirms that something has gone terribly wrong.

  The low moaning jumps up the scale in Collura’s video until it arrives at a pitch so high the camera’s microphone defaults to stuttering silence. Lee and Finley look from the road ahead to the fields through the driver’s window. What had been a single wedge off to the west has undergone a radical metamorphosis. This can’t be the same tornado. Its borders no longer possess the clean, discrete curvature of a classic vortex. It looks as though the entire mesocyclone has fallen to earth. So wide is the funnel—if such a word even applies here—that it will not fit into the viewfinder of Collura’s camera. As it roars northeast at more than forty miles per hour, half a mile separates Lee and Finley from a terrifying species of tornado they’ve never before seen. Collura angles his car into the wind. A broken window sprays the interior with glass. The dim afternoon darkens further, and all he can do is shout, “Son of a bitch! Fuck! My God. My God.”

  Ahead of M1, power poles quiver like tuning forks and suddenly pitch over. Black transmission lines lace the road. Lee and Finley career into the muddy ditch, tires spinning uselessly as the Cobalt slides to a stop. The tornado just beyond the window looks more like a sandstorm—its towering bluffs turning day into night. It’s so big they can’t tell whether it is moving toward them or away.

  The only thing that’s certain is that they can no longer move. M1 settles into the muck. All of the day’s promise has evaporated into panic. For the first time since she was a little girl, cowering from Minnesota thunderstorms, Finley is afraid.

  But even as the dark wall moves to within 800 yards, it is already hooking to the north, away from them. Lee and Finley can hardly believe what they have witnessed. What had been a moderately sized tornado one second became a monster in the next. Even before they have had a chance to look at the data, they know they’ve sampled a highly unusual rear-flank downdraft. The spike their temperature sensor has collected is the warmest they have yet observed, lending further credence to their theory: This particular RFD may have behaved like an engine’s injector, dosing the tornado with jets of buoyant air. The result was explosive upscale growth—a fundamental phase change. More practically, it just threatened and spared their lives all within a few heartbeats; the RFD was what hurtled them into the ditch, and what steered the tornado away.

  Finley and Lee’s reprieve is momentary at best. New storms are building and will soon track their way, with M1 hopelessly mired in axle-deep mud. Before long, Tim’s friend and mesonet operator Tony Laubach appears, driving M3, with Chris Karstens, an Iowa State grad student, in M2. Lee and Finley are further chagrined to see that a low-hanging power line has snagged Karstens’s anemometer and torn it from the rack. On TWISTEX’s first encounter with a high-end tornado, it is clear they have come up against something for which they were not prepared. Everyone feels a bit helpless, milling around the floundering Cobalt.

  Then they see Tim and Carl maneuver around the downed power lines toward M1 in the 4x4. The two step out, grinning like kids. Carl gawps at the departing storm to the north. “Oh my gosh,” he shouts. “That whole thing’s a tornado!”

  Tim lugs the winch hook and cable over to the Cobalt. “Man,” he says, as he fastens the hook to the undercarriage of M1. “We got a great view of this amazing transformation from a stovepipe into that huge wedge. Looked like the whole meso dropped right down to the ground.”

  Lee and Finley, still shaken from the encounter, saw it, of course—and they hope never to see its like that close ever again. Tim strides back to the truck, activates the winch, and begins to pull M1 from the ditch. As the sedan lurches out of the mud, they hear a loud and disconcerting bang. The Co
balt is back on the road, but Tim has accidentally yanked one of the sedan’s springs out of the control arm. As the sky continues to boil, M1 is crippled.

  While Tim works, Carl monitors radar. The danger isn’t imminent, but they need to get moving soon. There is another supercell headed their way, and it has a hook echo.

  Lee and Finley are prepared to abandon M1 to its fate if it comes to that—but Tim has another plan. He retrieves a length of clothesline from the truck, loops it over the spring, and orders one of the grad students to stand on it. If he can fully compress and load the spring, he can fit it back into place. But none of them are heavy enough. Lee can almost envision the gears in Tim’s analytical brain turning the problem over and over.

  At last, Tim strikes on the solution. He jacks up the rear end of the Cobalt, places the coil beneath the frame, and lowers the vehicle, using the sedan’s weight for compression. After lashing it with a slipknot, he shimmies beneath M1, fits the spring back into place, and cuts the cord with a pocketknife. He stands, wiping himself off, covered head to foot in viscous clay off the dirt road. The team stares from the newly mobile M1 to Tim in dumbstruck awe. “He has this presence about him,” Karstens says. “He’s very calm and collected.” It seems Tim always has an answer, a fix.

  The mesonets are finished for the day. They head for the nearest town. Tim and Carl, meanwhile, pile back into the truck and tear off toward Quinter. They’re still in the hunt as their taillights recede beneath the shadow of the storm.

  * * *

  Minutes later, on the outskirts of town, Tim steps out of the truck and walks to the rear, shoulders stooped against the cool shock of rain. He pops the hatch to the camper top and lowers the tailgate. His instruments—the turtles, the media probe—are stowed top-down in cutouts on a sliding plywood deck. With a single practiced motion, he seizes HITPR’s rim with his fingertips and lifts it over his head. He takes off scuttling toward the entrance of a park on the north side of town. The tornado is now approaching from the south. Behind him, Carl Young’s camera sweeps over the outlines of a playscape, a few picnic tables, and an embroidery of small shade trees at the end of a narrow road. The camera frame centers on Tim, who balances the probe on its rim, activates the data recorder, and sets it down gingerly onto wet grass.