The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  For Tim and his colleagues, this is a time of transition. At Iowa State, Gallus’s money has run out as well; 2011 marked the final year he would send students out into the field with TWISTEX. Even Tim’s work with Larry Brown runs up against similar budgetary constraints. In 2009, they had moved from Applied Research Associates to another contractor, National Technical Systems. But with Congress at an impasse and the federal budget funded on a continuing resolution, the spigot has been shut off. “So here we are—screwed,” Brown says. “We got all these great ideas and couldn’t get the money.” The hotshot team of explosives experts that has worked side by side since Tim was twenty years old has been disbanded.

  Through it all, Tim insists that TWISTEX will return; this is merely an unplanned hiatus, a breather. They’ve accomplished far too much to quit now. In Quinter and in Bowdle, they came away with some of the most compelling data sets ever gathered from within a rear-flank downdraft. Their coup at Bowdle outshone the whole of the multimillion-dollar VORTEX2 expedition. Lee and Finley have only just begun to tease apart the enormously heterogeneous surges responsible for transforming its vortex. If they can sample a few others just like it, TWISTEX will have cornered the market on data sets within what could be the essential mechanism of the storm. What’s more, the team now has at its disposal the most advanced in situ probe in the field. TOWER had proved itself near Bowdle. It may well be the tool they need to capture the data sets Tim and Gallus have been hunting. There will be more and bigger storms yet to come—more Manchesters—for Tim’s fully completed probe. TWISTEX’s best days, they all hope, might still lie ahead.

  But as Tim’s team stands down, Dr. Josh Wurman will take to the road on another expedition. VORTEX2 may have stumbled in its final year, but Wurman has landed the necessary grants to extend its mission into a new project, dubbed ROTATE 2012. To add salt to the wound, ROTATE’s core mission is to illuminate the near-surface environment in which Tim has specialized for years. The pièce de résistance of the effort is Wurman’s fleet of pods, now numbering twenty-two in situ probes, each equipped to take video while also logging pressure and wind speed. While Tim has been forging his new Lamborghini in TOWER, Wurman has built his pack of Chevrolets—which he’ll be deploying this year while Tim sits on the sidelines.

  Tim chose the gravel road during his meeting with Wurman at ChaserCon all those years ago. He’s scraped by and strung along, making magic out of nothing. But now all of Wurman’s warnings have held true. The longer Tim pushes forward, the clearer the destination becomes. After all this time, his route is looking like a dead end.

  There’s no time to wallow, though. Tim must attend to the present. Out of work and now semiretired, he approaches a company in Tupelo, Mississippi, that had built a small mobile radar for Reed Timmer during Storm Chasers. Hyperion Technology CEO Geoff Carter is already a big fan of Tim’s. An employee who’d been in the field during Discovery filming had returned to Tupelo gushing about Tim: “We gotta hire him; he’s a genius.” Carter offered him a job at the time, but Tim had too many obligations then.

  The offer, Carter tells him now, is still on the table. But before Tim accepts, he has a couple of unorthodox conditions: First, he won’t relocate to Tupelo and uproot his family. Second, he wants a guaranteed leave of absence in the early spring and summer to field TWISTEX. Whether the team takes to the plains again may be an ambiguous prospect, but Tim isn’t prepared to let it go. Storm season is sacrosanct and always will be.

  Carter doesn’t hesitate to agree to the terms.

  Hyperion’s ongoing research may have nothing to do with tornadoes, but one project at least falls within Tim’s sweet spot at the intersection of tech and severe weather. The company is developing an instrument package for NOAA that will measure hurricane wind speed and alert coastal communities to storm surge. Carter’s engineers have been racking their brains to come up with a sensor that is not only capable of reliably detecting the rising waters, but tough enough to take a sustained pounding. Tim’s off-the-cuff idea is practically antediluvian in its simplicity. Place a tube in the water and cap off the top with a pressure transducer. If the water rises, so will the pressure. The ease with which he has solved the device’s technical challenge is stunning. Carter even lets Tim deploy the package, dubbed eyeSPY, on the Mississippi coast, near Waveland. Hurricane Isaac is already darkening the Atlantic sky just off to the east.

  Next up for Hyperion, Tim takes on the construction of a new chase vehicle, one unlike any the world has ever seen. In 2010, he’d been contacted by an atmospheric scientist named Walter Lyons, who made an offer an intensely curious man such as Tim couldn’t possibly refuse. “DARPA said, ‘Send us your ideas; we want high-speed photography of lightning and sprites,’ ” recalls Lyons. “I needed a partner. Tim was the logical person.” During a 2006 side project for NatGeo, Tim had single-handedly documented aspects of lightning behavior that physicists had only theorized about, using the same high-speed cameras he’d trained on explosive shock waves for decades. When Lyons reached out in 2010, the pair spent the off-season shooting lightning, but found that the risk of stepping outside a vehicle amid deadly strikes was too dangerous. To succeed, they concluded, they’d need to find a way to stay inside. Now, Lyons and Tim have a chance to make good on that idea—with a recent influx of funding for lightning research and a blueprint for a customized lightning-chase vehicle.

  Like the sprawling VORTEX2, the project that Lyons wants Tim to join is a moon-shot effort underwritten by the federal government to unravel the fundamental mysteries of lightning. The project isn’t interested solely in the familiar bolt, but in observing a menagerie of dimly understood electromagnetic phenomena called transient luminous events, or TLEs. During some thunderstorms, electrical discharges splash luminous plasma across the upper atmosphere like paint in one of Jackson Pollock’s expressionist works. They can span dozens of miles but last for only a fraction of a second. Researchers want to know why only some lightning produces TLEs. Of equal interest are the recurrent upward strokes emanating from wind turbines, and the expensive repairs they often necessitate.

  The effort, dubbed the Physical Origins of Coupling to the Upper Atmosphere from Lightning, or PhOCAL, will involve a massive Lightning Mapping Array. This network of antennas, electric-field sensors, and continuously recording video cameras are spread across sections of central Kansas and west-central Oklahoma, usually near wind farms. SpriteNet cameras have been installed in locations throughout the plains, including one on Tim’s bedroom balcony.

  Tim’s contribution to the effort is what he dubs the Lightning Intercept Vehicle, or LIV. He’ll spend much of 2012 and 2013 building it with Lyons and Hyperion. Designed specifically to capture nature’s most transitory occurrence, LIV looks like your average white box truck. Upon closer inspection, however, its innards brim with the most advanced high-speed cameras money can buy. Hyperion donated the turret at the top of the truck, from which two Phantom cameras rotate 360 degrees. “You could buy a nice Bentley for what you’d pay for one of those Phantoms,” Lyons says. Mounted to the sides, front, and back, four closed-circuit, black-and-white Watec cameras are angled at the upper-atmosphere to capture sprites. A computer and a bank of screens in the back of the truck run the various cameras and a satellite weather system for lightning detection.

  But the real crowd-pleaser is the modified Beckman & Whitley Model 192. The Kahuna, as Tim refers to the instrument, is a nearly one-ton Cold War relic formerly used by the military to photograph nuclear explosions. It’s the videographic equivalent of a Gatling gun: eighty-two cameras spinning around a drum at up to 4,500 rotations per minute. The Kahuna can only run for thirty seconds or so before it overheats and tears itself apart. “When you approach eight hundred thousand, nine hundred thousand frames per second,” Tim says, “it screams like a girl.”

  Getting the contraption into the back of the LIV requires nothing less than a forklift. Over the years, Tim has developed something of an emotional
attachment to the Kahuna. At ARA, he retrofitted its film cameras to shoot digital images, an enormously complex undertaking. He now believes the hulking camera will reveal lightning behavior scientists haven’t even conceived of. “The objective there is to catch the attachment process, where the step leader touches the ground,” Tim says. “I want to see that formation process. I want to see the formation of the return stroke coming up off the ground.”

  If there is anything that might be able to compete with Tim’s fascination with the vortex, it’s lightning.

  He is already deeply engaged, obsessing over the LIV through the beginning of 2012. As the first severe weather of the year approaches, though, National Geographic comes through with an offer of just enough money to fund Tim’s tornado chasing for the season. It can only cover him, not TWISTEX; in exchange Tim will post “webisodes” of his best footage from the road. Tim can’t say no to an opportunity to chase.

  Soon, he and Paul are on the trail of a powerful EF4, near Salina, Kansas, in mid-April. The wedge roars over the table-flat fields at a crawl, allowing them to approach within a couple hundred yards. But that one chase will have to hold Tim over until next year.

  The ongoing drought is cutting the storms off from one of their main fuel sources: moisture. No other significant tornadoes touch down on the plains for the rest of the season. Even Josh Wurman, with all his funding, struggles to find any worthwhile storms. It may be just as well that TWISTEX is taking the year off.

  Through the rest of 2012, Tim pours himself into the LIV. It should be ready in time for the 2013 season. He may wonder, as he works, whether he could ease over into a parallel pursuit from here on out: lightning over tornadoes. This could well be the next unexplored frontier. He and Lyons have two years’ worth of DARPA funding, and they’re already planning a series of lightning-related research projects. Could this be his next Manchester, even?

  After nearly twenty-five years of chasing and too many close calls to count, Tim has an off-ramp if he wants to take it. He’s fifty-five years old and can devote his time to safer projects—he could embrace the landmark lightning study, lay off heavy tornado hunting, and spend a lot more time with his wife, kids, and grandkids. He has taken a step back; he can turn away entirely if he chooses to.

  But the vision of a Kansan EF4, with Paul at his side, doesn’t fade so easily.

  As much as Tim geeks out over the Kahuna and the LIV, it’s not the same. It’s not tornadoes. Even as Tim has assembled new projects to support himself, he’s still looking for a way to revive TWISTEX.

  As the 2013 season approaches, he thinks he might have found it: National Geographic says it is prepared to underwrite Tim’s tornado research in a bigger way again. Unfortunately, when the grant is finally funded, he only gets about half of what he’d asked for. The money is enough to keep Tim, Carl, Paul, and maybe another friend in the field. But it won’t cover a full complement of TWISTEX mesonets. He writes to Lee and Finley to break the bad news: they’re on their own once again this season.

  Tim has enough for a small mission, at least. And he’s intent on making the most of it. It will be like the old days—back when he chased with a minivan, a few turtles, and a companion to hold the camera.

  * * *

  Come early April, the familiar rush is back. Chasers are a helplessly optimistic bunch; the beginning of every storm season holds the crackle of promise. Any afternoon, Tim may witness something incredible, something that casts a shadow over the remainder of the year. In this way, some seasons become defined by a single storm. The tornado is committed to memory for its size, ferocity, or for the trail it leaves behind. Manchester is one of them. Jarrell, Texas, is another.

  But every once in a while, one storm becomes the yardstick against which all the others are measured. These are the storms of a chaser’s dreams. This season holds just such an event. It will be unlike anything Tim has seen. It will be unlike anything anyone alive has ever seen. Through all the maddening busts, all the miraculous intercepts, all the close calls, Tim has spent years searching the plains for the ultimate storm. Now it’s here.

  PART THREE

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  * * *

  CHASE NIRVANA

  FOR THE FIRST time since 2011, a small TWISTEX team assembles at the Samaras compound in Bennett, Colorado. On May 18, 2013, Tim, Carl, Paul, and Ed Grubb are gearing up to hunt down the swirling winds. In a way peculiar to storm chasers, their departure for the plains feels like a homecoming, even though they have no fixed destination. They haven’t seen much of each other lately, but as the men pull away from Bennett in the GMC, it’s as if the last TWISTEX mission were only yesterday.

  They drive east into central Kansas and arrive in time to see a beautiful tornado near the town of Rozel. Storm chasers are nothing if not connoisseurs—they fawn over size, symmetry, clear contrast, and clean lines—and this tornado has it all. With the sun setting in the background, a sliver of its trailing edge shines cantaloupe orange; the remainder of its bulk reflects a bone-gray calcite. The structure is enough to leave the group in awe. From the cloud base, it descends as straight as a stovepipe, bulging near the center before narrowing gradually at first, then sharply near the surface. The tip finally vanishes behind a churning bowl of tilled sod.

  Grubb sits on the truck’s window frame and films over the roof, his camera jouncing as they cruise through the farm country. Occasionally, the wind sock on Paul’s camera whipsaws into view. They pursue for half an hour, until the funnel lifts from the fields and retreats back into the clouds, like the tapering tail of a bull snake receding into tall grass. “There it goes,” Tim shouts over the idling diesel. The wind begins to ease, and they hear the silvery sound of birdsong. It has been the perfect tornado, the perfect chase: no cities, no towns, no deaths.

  For the first time since 2008, the only cameras in the truck are their own. There are no producers telling Tim what to do or where to go. And there are no hot microphones attached to his shirt. He is free to say whatever he wants without fear that the words will come to haunt him later on prime-time cable television. It’s like the early years, before money and fame complicated everything. They trade jokes and barbs. This is the most fun they’ve had together in a long time. Even Paul seems more extroverted than usual, wisecracking with the other guys.

  That night, the four check into a Comfort Suites in Pratt, Kansas, and find that they are sharing the motel with some old friends. Marc Austin, a forecaster at the National Weather Center in Norman, Oklahoma, and his wife, Sharon, had also chased the tornado near Rozel. Tim goes to bed early, as is his custom, but Paul, Carl, and Grubb file into Marc and Sharon’s cramped room and drink beer late into the night. The day had been the kind chasers live for, and everyone is in high spirits. The usual indicators had been equivocal—the forecast didn’t scream long-lived, significant twister—yet they’d all pulled it off, plucking a diamond from the rough. “It’s just a tornado out in the field, and it’s beautiful,” Marc says. “It’s kind of chase nirvana, that day was.”

  They pose for a photo of the five of them pointing dramatically at some imaginary off-frame threat, a goofy homage to Carl’s signature stance on Storm Chasers, when he’d stare resolutely into the middle distance and level an index finger at the oncoming tornado. “[Carl] had gone through a tough time because Storm Chasers was done. He looked down,” Sharon Austin says. But tonight, it seems the old Carl has resurfaced. She suspects chasing with Tim has lifted his spirits. The season is off to a raring start, and Carl is again on the road with friends.

  There’s an intimate proximity to chasing across states with the same group, in the same vehicle, that one seldom experiences in day-to-day life. A sense of camaraderie inevitably emerges over the long chase, along with a singular miasma. As Tim describes it: “You spend three or four days in a vehicle, it develops a certain scent. After a three- to four-day trip, we’ve got a lot of knowledge of each other and what’s going on in our l
ives. Fortunately, our group gets along really well. That’s the secret—you need people who are compatible. And of course, showering regularly is a good thing, too.”

  As good as it feels to have the gang back together, there are still moments early in the season that unearth an uneasy dissonance between Carl’s style and Tim’s. The Discovery Channel producers may have brought it to the fore, but Carl has always been the more aggressive chaser. A few days later, by May 20, they have gone south after a storm near Bray, Oklahoma, east of Lawton. Carl steers the probe truck along a narrow county road, hemmed in on either side with thick scrub brush and stunted trees. Tim glances down at an iPad, and his fingers move over the road map on the screen. He leans forward in his seat and peers up at the sky, eyes searching for signs of rapid cloud movement. A light rain taps against the windshield, punctuated by the heavier thwack of hailstones.

  There is a tornado somewhere off to the left, behind the vegetation—that much he knows for certain. But they have lost sight of it. Worse, Tim suspects the vortex is beginning to rope. As a tornado becomes dislodged from the updraft, the powerful blowing cold of the forward-flank downdraft could send the dying twister careening into their path.

  “We don’t want to get right beside it,” Tim advises Carl. “Let’s be careful because we’re in limited visibility.”

  The trees and brush form a dense screen; they’re driving in the blind. But Carl doesn’t let off the gas.

  “Careful! It’s right next to us,” Tim says, more forcefully this time. “Slow down a little bit. Let’s find out where it’s at.”

  “It’s right here,” Grubb says, finally catching sight of the funnel.

  “Yeah,” Tim says, a note of exasperation in his voice. “I know.”