The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  His video camerawork, shaky at first, gradually smooths out. The frame now glides over its subjects, dives in close, and backpedals seamlessly for the broad shot. As Tim’s father had encouraged him to keep tinkering with appliances and his ham radio, Tim in turn supports Paul’s passion. In fact, he has put Paul in charge of creating his latest tornado compilation DVD, which he’ll sell on his website and at ChaserCon. Since 2004, when Tim put out a two-disc set of his best tornado sightings, called Driven by Passion, he has seen a great many storms. It is time, he tells his son, for a new entry, Driven by Passion II.

  The young man is thrilled to be given the responsibility, and he immediately sets to work wading through untold hours of chase video. He composes ominous musical cues with a synthesizer and cleanly splices together footage shot by Tim, Carl, and eventually himself. Each storm is given a neat opening dateline to anchor the viewer in time and place. Best of all, the episode legend on the inside flap is set against a photograph Paul himself has taken. It is a once-in-a-lifetime shot of a monstrous tornado, folds of condensation and dust spiral up its broad flanks like frayed bandaging. Kathy urges Tim to put Paul’s name on the cover. “He needs credit for this,” she tells him. Paul is content with his name featured prominently in the credits: “Produced by Paul Samaras.”

  Driven by Passion II is no Pixar epic; to Paul, the DVD is something more. It is the highlight reel of a chaser’s life. An accounting of what his father has done, and how. In the world of storms, Tim is an icon. A friend of the family, Sharon Austin, asks Paul if he ever feels lost in the wide span of his father’s shadow. “No,” he replies. “I’m just happy to be a part of things.”

  After immersing himself in Tim’s footage, Paul hits the road with TWISTEX more and more often. At first he is relegated to observing from the backseat of the probe truck or a mesonet. But his talent is unmistakable, even if his presence in the group is muted. Paul is a hard guy to get to know, says Lee and Finley’s former student Matt Grzych: “He’s a shy guy, but an incredible photographer. He took some of the best tornado images I’ve ever seen.”

  With the TWISTEX team, Paul is finding not only direction, but a second family. In a video shot by one of the mesonet drivers, Ed Grubb, he and copilot Tony Laubach pull to the side of the road behind Tim’s truck, near Campo, Colorado. Hail piles in pristine drifts up to their ankles and smokes in the mid-May air. Tim, Carl, and Grzych compress the ice pellets into dripping balls and hurl them at M3. Hailstones soar back and forth across the ditch in coordinated fusillades. Laubach scores a direct hit against Tim’s back. Tim returns fire, and given his form, it becomes clear that his Little League days had in fact been spent studying the clouds. They laugh and holler, and by the end of the fight all are soaked in ice water.

  And there, at the edge of the frame, Paul, TWISTEX’s documentary eye, peers through the lens of his DSLR, the faintest smirk playing at the corners of his mouth. The image speaks volumes. He’s not the guy to join the hurly-burly, but he is one of them nonetheless, taking it all in.

  His mother doesn’t so much mind the chasing. For all her misgivings, it warms her heart to see how close Tim and Paul have become, united by a common mission. Again she worries when she sees clips from deployments like Tipton, where the margin of error seems so narrow. But then, Kathy knows, she’s not the expert. She’s never been storm chasing. “I didn’t understand how they moved,” she says. “I always figured [Tim] knew not to get too close.”

  Even so, she speaks in no uncertain terms about the ground rules when Paul joins TWISTEX—never risk their child’s safety, no matter how worthy the cause. Tim understands, in the marrow of his bones, but she drives her point home with unmistakable clarity: “You have my only son.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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  WARNINGS

  BY THE TIME VORTEX2 is ramping up for its debut in 2009, TWISTEX has already gotten a serious head start. The 2008 season was a bountiful one for Tim’s team. The Quinter tornado was a bracing experience for Lee and Finley, but the storm also contained some of the warmest temperatures they’ve ever heard of inside a rear-flank downdraft. Sifting through the mesonet data, they can only describe the quantity of latent heat inside the RFD surge as “astronomical.” “Clearly, it’s getting air from some other source, and it was dramatic,” Lee says. This sample seems to bear out their hunch that the warm downdraft air isn’t falling so much as being driven. If the tornado’s explosive growth following the surge is any indication, Lee and Finley have amassed their first well-recorded case in which this unique downdraft has been associated with the drastic intensification of an already violent storm.

  The week following Quinter, Tim celebrated the intercept near Tipton, Kansas, with Paul and Carl. The media probe logged a direct hit, and a nearby turtle’s pressure trace seems to have detected a series of secondary vortices following on the heels of the EF1 tornado. The findings derived from HITPR, the media probe, and mesonet data will be published in the American Meteorological Society’s prestigious Monthly Weather Review.

  From the beginning, TWISTEX’s objective has been to observe all range of storms—monsters like Quinter, and even relatively minor events like Tipton—so that its members might better understand the features these tornadoes share and, perhaps just as important, the ones they don’t. The group is already making progress.

  But on the cusp of the 2009 season, the well runs dry. For the first time since the earliest days of the turtle, the National Geographic Society has declined Tim’s grant request. A relationship that has lasted for six years ends, for the time being, rather abruptly. “Obviously, it was not an easy decision,” says Rebecca Martin, director of the society’s Expeditions Council. “But with limited funds we do have to make hard choices.”

  For the moment, Tim can still count on Bill Gallus as an ardent supporter, though Tim knows that Iowa State’s NOAA grant will not field the entire team. He has gathered other revenue streams over the years—small endorsements and merchandising deals—but they are usually made in exchange for free gear, not operational cash. Unless he can round up a new sponsor, the future of TWISTEX suddenly looks uncertain.

  As if one calamity weren’t enough, the bad news lands at a time when Tim’s probe program seems to be faltering as well. The instinctual calculus that guides Tim in the field is lately placing him at odds with his scientific mission. Deploy too early and he misses the tornado. Deploy too late and he doesn’t get out in time. His talent has always been for straddling the line between. He takes into account the road network, the tornado’s trajectory, and its forward speed. And unless he arrives at something like certainty, he won’t step out onto a patch of ground that in minutes—or seconds—will be exposed to winds capable of removing a house from its foundation.

  Bill Gallus understands that this means the deployment of certain devices must be prioritized above others. But in recent intercepts, he hasn’t been able to glean the data he needs. His task as Tim’s brain trust is to gently push him toward the instruments that offer the most scientific value. The trick is to do so without offending him in the process, as Josh Wurman had at ChaserCon.

  Like Wurman before him, Gallus wants wind-speed data, not pressure. There’s a big question mark surrounding the distribution of wind speeds in the boundary layer, and that’s where the most promising research lies right now. The media probe is a better tool for gathering velocity estimates, especially as the wind turns vertical, since it’s possible to use the video to deduce the speed of debris. Even more reliable is a pair of media probes, which is what Gallus would like to see more often. As subtly as possible, he presses: “Maybe there’s some chance you could deploy the media probes first?”

  For reasons both romantic and tactical in nature, Tim has insisted on prioritizing the deployment of HITPR. The original probe is his first love, and pressure is his longest-running data set. It brought him acclaim, financial backing, and the respect of scientists he admires. There’s a certain stubbornness
and pride to his trust in the turtle. More practically, the turtle weighs only fifty pounds and can be deployed in moments. The media probe, on the other hand, weighs a backbreaking one hundred pounds. Tim is now fifty-one, doing most of the heavy lifting himself. At moments like this Tim must empathize with Howie Bluestein’s travails during the TOTO years, bogged down not only by the wiliness of tornadoes, but by the weight of his own instrument.

  If there’s a third parcel of bad news to complete the trio, it’s that Josh Wurman might have been right after all. His words from back in Aurora—about the limitations of Tim’s turtles, and the precariousness of his funding—must start to echo now. Both warnings are suddenly, aggravatingly prescient.

  Tim has spent the last few seasons with his nose to the grindstone. If he’s to guide TWISTEX toward major breakthroughs, he needs to look beyond each day’s chase to next month, next year. What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? Scientific leadership requires a whole new state of mind for Tim, and he’s been caught off-guard. To be effective again, Tim’s probe program needs a new direction. The turtle and the media probe were both revolutionary in their own ways, but a different device is required to push atmospheric science forward long-term.

  More immediately, Tim needs a new source of operational cash. With Wurman’s VORTEX2 experiment about to kick off in May, TWISTEX can’t very well prove itself if it can’t afford to chase.

  Ironically, it’s Wurman himself who opens the door for Tim’s next opportunity, perhaps inadvertently. In December 2008, the Discovery Channel reaches out to Tim and invites him to join the cast of Storm Chasers, a prime-time meteorological melodrama that tails researchers and severe-weather junkies on the cross-country hunt. With no other untapped benefactors, it’s an offer that Tim can’t possibly pass up.

  His soon-to-be costars, Reed Timmer and Sean Casey, pilot custom-armored vehicles into proximity for the ultimate shot. They shout, jockey, engage in internecine squabbles, and make for divertingly watchable reality television. Considerably less theatrical is the team led by the show’s only scientist, Dr. Josh Wurman. He deploys mobile radar trucks and pod probes in pursuit of data, a cool, collected quest not so readily suited to its fleeting slice of a forty-minute show. “The joke about our team was that we’re sort of serial killers,” Wurman says. “Our pulses don’t go up when the tornado happens. The Discovery people were thoroughly horrified.”

  So horrified, in fact, that the producers need another research group to join the cast and leaven Wurman’s undramatic sobriety. To keep TWISTEX afloat, Tim agrees to sign over to Discovery the exclusive right to film his exploits for the show’s third season. With Discovery’s money, he can now afford to field his team for the entire season. There will even be enough left over to fill out the roster. He brings mesonet driver Ed Grubb on full-time. The fifty-five-year-old pensioner from Thornton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, possesses a well-combed and enviable head of salt-and-pepper hair, and a spiny mustache above a perpetually mischievous grin. At heart, Grubb is still the young goofball who played wide receiver for the Colorado School of Mines. He studied petroleum engineering there, but his career didn’t survive the oil-price collapse of the 1980s. After that, he switched gears and hired on with the Adams County School District in Commerce City, Colorado, as head of maintenance and construction. In his retirement, he chases storms and has probably seen more tornadoes than just about anyone else on the team. Like Tim, he may not have earned a degree in meteorology, but he knows how to keep a weather eye on the dangers ahead. “He’s a good guy to have out there,” Bruce Lee says, praising his situational awareness.

  Under the watchful eye of the Discovery Channel, the 2009 season gets under way. The early months offer few useful intercepts, but things pick up in June. On the nineteenth, Tim at last lands the double media-probe deployment Gallus has long begged for, just outside Aurora, Nebraska. But to his profound disappointment, the footage is useless. While the single media probe’s 2004 penetration of the F3 in Storm Lake, Iowa, occurred in broad daylight, the Aurora tornado recording takes place at dusk. The light is too weak to accurately track debris. As it stands, they are no closer to getting a pure wind-speed measurement out of the media probes. The one point of light is Lee and Finley’s mesonet work. They collect a data set from across the hook echo of the Aurora tornado over nearly its entire life cycle, a rare thing in the history of atmospheric field science.

  But in the meantime, VORTEX2 lands its first big data set of the year on a moderate EF2 tornado in Goshen County, Wyoming. The team surrounds the storm with mobile radars, mesonets, weather balloons, and various in situ instruments. None of the pods lands a direct hit, but the sheer number of observing platforms makes this the most thoroughly examined twister in history.

  The 2009 season closes without any further successes, either for TWISTEX or VORTEX2. In a calm year, the first in which both teams have been active, the score ends 1–0, VORTEX2 the winner. With just one resounding success, Wurman no doubt would have preferred more. But it’s a good start for the program in a modest season, and 2010 promises a second chance. Tim, meanwhile, still has serious problems to solve.

  In the interlude between seasons, Tim begins to bend his engineer’s mind to the task of envisioning a new direction for his probe program. He is a man pulled in many directions, by family, by a demanding full-time job at Applied Research Associates, and by TWISTEX. After his day job, after dinner with his family, Tim descends into the basement of his Lakewood home—Kathy calls it his “sanctuary”—and begins to conceptualize and construct a brand-new probe. Rare are the moments when his children find him relaxing on the couch.

  * * *

  By early May and the start of the 2010 tornado season, Tim emerges from the basement, confident he has remedied most of the design flaws and limitations of both the media probe and the turtle. He has done so by making something entirely new: a next-generation probe that combines both his signature devices—and then some—into one package. Tim dubs the instrument TOWER. Like HITPR, TOWER’s base is squat and safety-cone orange, but pyramidal rather than conical. There, the similarities end. The remainder of its instrumentation is mounted on a metal mast rising to the height of the average NBA point guard. Rather than sampling wind speed just a few inches above the surface, TOWER’s sonic and conventional anemometers obtain measurements at three different elevations, up to six and a half feet off the ground. At the top, a video pod scans a full 360 degrees. The humidity and temperature sensors, instead of cooking inside the steel shell of the turtle, are aspirated by a small fan.

  Its final and most theatrical component is inspired by a previous chase in the Texas Panhandle, where Tim watched lightning set an oil well ablaze. Tarry gouts of smoke had become entrained in the storm’s updraft, spiraling skyward. Hoping for a similar effect, Tim has affixed a battery of orange smoke canisters to the center of TOWER’s stem.

  Without a doubt, this is the most advanced in situ probe ever constructed—as far away as an instrument can get from a fleet of Chevy probes.

  But with all its improvements, the package tips the scales at an immovable four hundred pounds. One of the media probe’s chief liabilities—its weight—has now multiplied. No one will be hoisting this instrument and jogging down the road with it. Tim will have to deploy directly from the back of the truck.

  This means that his faithful black GMC has outlived its usefulness. Tim’s new probe vehicle—outfitted by a company in Englewood, Colorado, not far from his home—is the ultimate storm-chasing rig: a white, one-ton GMC diesel, sealed from bumper to bumper with an impact-resistant elastomeric Line-X coating. A brush guard shields the front end, to which eight high-intensity driving lights are mounted. To fend off sharp debris, the off-road tires boast an internal stiffening made of Kevlar.

  After the Quinter debacle, Tim also incorporates a winch with 8,000 pounds of pulling power, along with a few new deluxe touches. To the hood, as a side project for Boeing, he has installed carbon-co
mposite tiles and piezometer blocks, for measuring the force of hail impacts. Any time these sensors and tiles take a hit, they will trigger a Vision Research Phantom V12 high-speed camera mounted to the dash. This instrument, which costs about as much as a new car, can take high-def footage at a blistering 6,800 frames per second.

  Last, and most essential, is the 1,500-pound-capacity hydraulic lift gate at the rear. This he will use to lower TOWER to the ground—as quickly as possible. Winnowing down deployment time is imperative. “What I’m hoping for is around twenty to thirty seconds, which is quite a task given its weight,” Tim says. “If we can do that, we can collect more information than any instrument that has ever been placed in the path of a tornado.”

  Like a NASCAR pit crew, Tim and Carl drill, deploying TOWER repeatedly. They unfasten the black straps crisscrossing the base, shove TOWER onto the lift gate, lower it, and pull the instrument off the platform with a pair of steel handles.

  Yet no matter how many times they practice, the unloading always takes longer than Tim would prefer. TOWER is as unwieldy as TOTO. Certainly, it will allow for no time to deploy a second device, much less a fleet of them. To make matters worse, TOWER isn’t technically ready as storm season rolls around; Tim hasn’t had time to install a dynamic pressure-reduction port. But the season is upon them, whether Tim and TWISTEX are ready or not.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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