The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  BOWDLE, SOUTH DAKOTA

  ON MAY 10, 2010, TWISTEX misses the year’s first major tornado outbreak, losing out on two EF4s in the Oklahoma City area. Four days later, they’re in deep West Texas, pursuing a supercell near a town aptly named Notrees. But the road grid in this part of the state couldn’t be more ill suited to storm chasing. TOWER never gets anywhere near its target.

  To miss a trio of strong tornadoes with the first new probe Tim has developed in seven years is grating. As much as he knows by now that patience—for weeks, for months, for years—is the key to finding the right intercept, that doesn’t make the close calls any easier to bear. Tim’s lugging around either the future of tornado research or a four-hundred-pound scrap heap in the back of his truck—and he can’t know which until it enters the crucible of a plains titan.

  By May 21, 2010, Bruce Lee and Kathy Finley have to return to their home state, for what should be a short breather. They stop off in Minneapolis to visit Finley’s sister and complete repairs on a mesonet station that a student had accidentally smashed against a motel awning. In the early-morning hours of the twenty-second, they examine the latest weather model runs, as they have every day so far this season. To their shock, the outlook for the day’s storm potential has improved tremendously overnight. The models predict a highly unstable atmosphere over South Dakota. Along with preconditions such as wind shear, they look for the presence of moisture, heat, and the tendency for air to rise, which is accounted for by a metric known as convective available potential energy, or CAPE. With CAPE at 1,000 joules per kilogram, storms are likely. At 2,500 joules, storm chasers start to perk up. For May 22, the models project 4,800 joules per kilogram. This should bring chasers streaming from all directions. It is the kind of number heralding days of legend, the likes of Jarrell, Texas, 1997, or Bridge Creek, Oklahoma, 1999.

  Lee and Finley jump on the phone at 6:00 a.m. The rest of the team is currently snoozing in a motel in Chadron, Nebraska, more than 600 miles to their southwest. They manage to raise their former student Matt Grzych, and tell him to boot up his laptop to look at the night’s model runs, especially the Rapid Update Cycle, or RUC. Grzych pores over the data and agrees: this is the setup TWISTEX has been waiting for. Before long, Carl, too, is enthusing over the RUC model. That each forecaster on the team is zeroing in on the same South Dakota target is telling.

  Grzych and Carl start rousting the sleeping crew. Lee and Finley hurriedly finish the repairs on the mesonet and drive some six hours west onto the South Dakota plains, arriving after lunch with plenty of time to spare. The eastern and central portions of the state are a mosaic of tallgrass prairie and shallow wetlands. Skeins of waterfowl lace the sky. The fields are alive with pheasants as Lee and Finley drive past, sporting so many that they fear one will fly into the mesonet and damage its sensitive sensors. The two spend the remainder of the early afternoon birding, until the magic hour arrives and the cumulus towers begin their initial ascent.

  By midafternoon, the rest of the team converges on the rendezvous. Chris Karstens, the Iowa State grad student, always knows when he is within range of his fellow researchers. The silent TWISTEX frequency suddenly crackles to life with the voices of friends, trading joking insults and comparing observations.

  Tony Laubach follows close behind in M3, along with Ed Grubb. Following the deployment briefing, the TWISTEX crew saddles up, confident in the day’s prospects. TOWER is securely strapped to the back of Tim’s probe truck. The mesonets are manned by some of the most competent chasers and atmospheric scientists in the field. The clouds are primed to explode. “It’s like you’re going to war,” Karstens says.

  Best of all, they learn that VORTEX2 is sitting this storm out. The night before, the field coordinator’s vehicle had broken down. “In their defense, they had been going very hard. They didn’t get back to their hotel until 4:00 a.m.,” Finley says. “Everybody was pretty exhausted.”

  With its unmanned drones, fleet of mobile radars, and vast mesonet array, VORTEX2 can cover every facet of a storm in a way the much-leaner TWISTEX never will. Since 2009, VORTEX2’s armada has seemed omnipresent, smothering every chase. “Everywhere we went,” Lee laments, “there were these VORTEX vehicles. And as soon as they arrive, our data isn’t worth a lot.”

  But the project’s very enormity also means that any number of moving parts can break down. Wurman’s contingent is a cruise ship—slow to get moving, slow to change course. If the TWISTEX crew had thrown in with VORTEX2, they would have missed what is shaping up to be the most promising storm since the project launched the year before.

  With their rival off-line in North Platte, Nebraska, there is no one else with whom to share the roads. The storm is TWISTEX’s for the taking. Despite the long odds of Tim’s gamble—the limitations of staying small and agile, the money problems, the risk of operating without Wurman’s mobile Doppler—it looks as if Tim has pulled it off again. If the new probe works.

  * * *

  Around four that afternoon, west of Bowdle, South Dakota, the mesonets travel north in a line, roughly a kilometer apart, down a narrow and winding dirt road. Consistent spacing between mesonets is paramount for data collection, and they maintain this distance with a GPS program Karstens has developed, called Sidekick, which displays the location of each vehicle on a map.

  Lee can already sense that the day is about to get interesting. The mesocyclone to his west is pendant above the low rise of northern plain like a glacier, jagged and massive and all but kissing the earth. As the fields wash past, and the cars and radio waves fill with excited chatter, Grubb thinks he may have spotted telltale dust swirling along the ground. In M1, Lee identifies the storm’s clear slot, connoting the passage of the rear-flank downdraft. The updraft is organizing, shaped and smoothed by laminar winds. The show is about to begin.

  “Okay, mesonet,” Lee says, “the way we’re gonna line up is [M1] will take the lead position. We’ll try to stay roughly half a kilometer to the south of the tornado path. Tony, you’re a kilometer behind us. M2, you’re a kilometer behind Tony.”

  Arrayed along the flank of the storm, Lee orders the convoy to a momentary halt as they approach the mesocyclone. Any farther and M1 risks straying into no-man’s-land, the perilous pocket inside which the tornado could come down quite literally on their heads.

  Without warning, a gust wails out of the west and rocks the mesonets, peppering the vehicles with rain and dust like bird shot. They’ve just penetrated their first RFD of the day. M1’s mesonet station reports a forty-six-mile-per-hour gust. The wall cloud—the low-slung feature at the bottom of the mesocyclone, from which the tornado will soon emerge—swings past M3, turbulent and ragged, like dirty cotton. On closer inspection, it appears to contain a possible funnel, or at least the earliest stages of one.

  A palpitating lobe of condensation hovers just above M1, an indication that the mesocyclone is strengthening and accelerating. It’s preparing to focus the broadly distributed power of its slow turning into the tornado’s vicious knife edge. The storm bears away east-northeast, and the convoy begins to move north with it, proceeding deliberately, at no more than twenty miles per hour. As Lee and Finley scan the wall cloud, they notice again the lowering to their four o’clock. Tornadogenesis has a way of feeling both gradual and surprisingly sudden. The feathering lobe of condensation narrows, sharpens, and smooths until at last the tip is honed to a needlepoint. It swoons breathtakingly close to earth, then decays in filigreed shreds before retreating back into the wall cloud. Striated bands of stratus flood the swelling mass of the mesocyclone. The storm is feeding. “Wow,” Lee gasps. “This is something! We’ve got winds holding at forty [knots] out of the west-northwest.”

  At a rate almost imperceptible to the eye, the funnel returns, building and lengthening, stretching inexorably toward the surface. “The thing is just cranking,” Finley says.

  Now several funnels knife through the lowering. Is this the birth of the multiple-vortex? The radio wave
s are chaotic with real-time speculation. But within moments the sky has answered: the multiple vortices coalesce into a wedge. A welter of dust erupts from the fields, and the first reachable tornado of the season has officially touched down. Within seconds it becomes apparent that TWISTEX has a high-end twister on its hands. No need to cycle, to mature, to build angular momentum. This thing was born a classic plains beast. A voice over the radio crows, “Tornado on the ground, folks!”

  A cheer goes up over the TWISTEX frequency.

  * * *

  North of the mesonets, on the other side of the tornado, are Tim, Carl, and Grzych—packed into Tim’s new rig with a Discovery cameraman. They hurry east along Highway 12 toward Bowdle. The vortex drills down onto the horizon, tethering earth and sky. “This thing is moving northeast,” Tim says. “It’s coming toward us.”

  “Wow,” Carl exclaims, “it’s right there!”

  The tornado churns along the wide South Dakota prairie, closing in on a slice of highway that’ll be their best shot at a deployment. Even with the new probe truck and its big diesel, Tim is struggling to head it off. “The thing’s gonna translate across the road,” he says.

  “Are we going to deploy the probe here?” Grzych asks.

  “I’m not sure. I can’t get a handle on the direction.”

  But this is it, now or never.

  Carl brings the truck to a stop in the breakdown lane and leaves the engine running as they step out, clothes snapping in the wind. Tim kneels beside the truck, strokes his chin, and looks for the sign. The cloud motion overhead is vigorous, boiling. The tornado has momentarily roped out, but there is little doubt that it will return. The question is when.

  Tim peers up at the wall cloud, hovering like a mother ship. He sees low-level moisture drift beneath the updraft like tatters of low fog. This is good. It means the wall cloud is cycling, gathering its strength for the next pulse. The storm could produce another tornado any second now.

  The internal clock that guides Tim’s deployment timing is ticking down. The circulation is closing in. He turns to Carl and Grzych. “Let’s do it.”

  They remove the tie-downs, lower the lift gate, and strain to pull TOWER onto the asphalt. Tim yanks the smoke-canister pins and orange braids belch forth and stream across the field toward the storm. He raises the lift gate and stands watching for a moment until he realizes how quickly the developing circulation is narrowing the distance.

  It looks like the storm is falling from the sky. The wedge descends and vortices start daggering from its underside.

  Leaves and wheat stalks bombard them. The men scuttle around the truck and pile in. The cab becomes a wind tunnel as inflow blasts through the open doors. “Get in! Get in! Get in!” they shout at the Discovery cameraman, his lens still trained on the tornado.

  As the cab’s detritus takes flight, they muscle the doors shut. Carl pushes the accelerator to the floor. The diesel engine roars.

  Grzych peers through the rear window at the receding TOWER and the strengthening vortex.

  “It’s going in,” he announces. “It’s going in!”

  Carl raises his fist and the cab rings with joyful hollering.

  “All right! All right!” Tim says. “Carl, pull over! Pull over! We gotta record it!”

  A short distance up the road, Carl again swings into the breakdown lane and throws the truck into park. The men spill from the GMC. They can see the inflow coursing low over the hay fields—a deadly river of radial wind known to chasers as the ghost train. The funnel isn’t quite fully condensed, more like a wedge in gestation, trailing a bolus of swirling condensation over TOWER. In its current form, this may be no Manchester beast, but at least this field test has provided proof of concept: even from here, Tim can see that TOWER stands stubbornly rooted to the asphalt.

  Tim’s voice rises above the deafening wind almost to the breaking point, his composure utterly lost now. “It’s right in there! It’s right in there!”

  He jabs his fists at the air and throws his arms roughly around his comrades in the bar ditch. Over the years, Tim’s fortunes have risen and fallen. The creation of TOWER, the most technologically sophisticated in situ probe ever devised, was the jolt his research program needed. Now it’s proven worth it. His invention has shown it can stand strong in the guts of a growing tornado. Tim has a reason to smile and laugh again, like a storm chaser in the thrall of his first intercept.

  * * *

  Off to the west, the mesonets steer toward TOWER’s position, dataloggers humming. Driving point, M1 has the tornado in its sights. Sitting at the dead center of the highway ahead, Tim’s fledgling twister has matured and looms ever larger, its color the pale hue of bone. They’re in the presence of the beast now, an enormous incisor sunk into the horizon. Somehow, Lee sounds like he’s directing traffic. “Let’s keep spread out so we can get a good gradient data set off to the west within this RFD until it crosses the road,” he says over the radio. “Then we’ll scoot in just south, and underneath it, and back up.”

  As they move in closer, the span of M1’s windshield is almost entirely filled with a vortex whose manifestation from one instant to the next is utterly novel, a transfixing, almost hypnotic sight. It is a reminder that a tornado isn’t an object in the same way we think of a stone or a handful of earth. It isn’t a thing, it’s a process, a wholesale redistribution of pressure and air. The effects of this process, however, are all too tangible. Off to the left, M1 is the first to notice leaning power poles, a defoliated line of trees, a house with an exposed span of attic lumber, and pastures strewn with debris of every size and shape.

  Directly across the highway, TOWER smokes defiantly; its anemometers wheel, and the orange canisters suffuse the mesonets with the scent of their acrid orange plume. Another cheer goes up over the radio. Laubach screams jubilantly, almost involuntarily: “Motherfucker!” Tim has done it again.

  As they enter the outskirts of Bowdle, the wail of the town’s siren presses in through the windows. The storm is continuing to grow; they’re on the trail of a giant. Its broad shadow sweeps across the plains to the north of town like something out of a bad dream. At Bowdle’s eastern edge, M1 turns north up State Highway 47 for the intercept.

  When they gain sight of it again to the mesonets’ northwest, the funnel is as wide as any Lee and Finley have ever seen. Conservatively, the tornado may be at least three-quarters of a mile across. At M1’s ten o’clock, Lee suspects the thing is tracking a hair north of east and will cross the road ahead. Strung along the highway, TWISTEX closes the distance.

  “This thing is absolutely gigantic,” Lee says. “We’re gonna be careful on this one. This is a high-end deal.”

  The M1 camera is centered on the skinny strip of bright western horizon, where the sun’s light ends and miles of frothing, sea-foam clouds carousel cyclonically, from north to south. But below the mesocyclone’s low rim, rain and wrapping condensation hide something even darker. Often enough, the rain briefly clears and they see it, hundreds of yards across, tapered like a spearhead whose tip is driven into the earth. Here, the catastrophic EF4 winds sweep away the feathering edges of the meso and file the vortex smooth. Lee pulls M1 to the side of the highway and instructs M2 and M3 to do likewise.

  “It’s almost stationary,” he observes. He assumes the tornado will cross the road ahead at some point, and Lee has no intention of being anywhere near the thing when it does. The mesonets are now in an ideal position to collect data. He resolves to press no farther. With the sun now entirely occluded by the wedge, it’s as if they’re witnessing a solar eclipse, the funnel nearly black and its gilt edges flaring gold.

  At about this moment, the probe truck passes Lee. They’ve retrieved TOWER and are angling for a second intercept. Inside the truck, Tim is clearly unnerved. The wedge menaces the highway, as though daring them to cross its path, to step into the threshold of a door that is about to slam shut. Manchester may have been all white knuckles, but to attempt to deploy now woul
d be suicide. “I dunno, guys, this is getting too fucking close,” he says. Then, to Carl, who is driving: “There are people everywhere, man. This is too damn dangerous. Stop! This thing may translate to the east now. We’re just going to have to wait this one out.”

  Carl pulls off onto the breakdown lane a quarter mile or so ahead of the mesonets—and about 400 yards from the tornado. Without warning, a massive RFD surge rocks the probe truck and each of the mesonets. Rain curtains sweep over the fields and obscure the tornado.

  “M2 is picking up a good RFD from the west.”

  “M1 is, too. Hopefully it doesn’t get so strong that it knocks these power lines down.”

  “The tornado is becoming rain wrapped from M2’s standpoint.”

  “Roger. We’ve got large debris coming up on the east side of it.”

  After only a minute, the view clears out again. In M1, Lee and Finley spot the tornado’s trailing edge. A single subvortex emerges against the backlighting sun and separates from the mother circulation for an instant. Then it rotates back around the south face, out of sight. Even the hardened researchers are reduced to monosyllabic expressions of awe.

  “Wow,” Finley says, her voice hushed.

  They can see now that a second RFD surge has touched off a transformation. What first appeared as a ragged wedge now more closely resembles an enormous stovepipe, as though a pair of great hands has molded and squeezed the funnel into something sleeker, narrower, and infinitely more violent. Its vortical profile rises a precipitous ninety degrees from the earth below like a superstructure’s mammoth colonnade, a true destroyer of cities.

  Tim, Carl, and Grzych kneel in the sheltering lee of the GMC. From this distance, they can just make out a row of 160-foot power transmission towers. They must weigh many tons apiece, but next to this thing, taller than any mountain, the towers seem brittle and tiny. As the edge of the vortex moves to overtake the first, the metal spire emits a brilliant blue pulse of light and folds down onto itself. The shrieking tangle of steel beams shears from its concrete footings. One after the next, the towers fall. From its point of anchorage, one of them plows the prairie for some four hundred yards before the wind finally releases it.