He glances at the data accumulating on the screen in the backseat of RaXPol, then looks to the real-time radar display, which reveals a prominent hook echo. It’s still in there, of this there can be no doubt. Snyder can even make a crude estimate of its wind velocities: “It’s folding over at least thirty . . . sixty, greater than sixty meters per second,” he says. “That’s over 140 miles per hour.”
He’s shocked by how intense the tornado has already become. Though he couldn’t know this in real time, the true ground-relative velocities are closer to two hundred miles per hour.
By 6:15 p.m., Bluestein’s assistants are retracting the hydraulic stabilizers and prepping RaXPol for the next move. They believe the tornado is still tracking to the southeast, which will take it farther and farther out of range.
They need to keep ahead of it and also avoid the large hail core that radar indicates is on its way. The storm will ultimately set a state record for hail size, producing chunks of ice up to six inches across. It’s just one of many records to be set tonight.
As far as Bluestein is concerned, they have only two options: either they drop south after the tornado or head east, keeping the storm on their right side. After a brief deliberation, he judges it safer to drive east. The roads directly to the south aren’t paved, and he can’t risk getting stuck in this heavy rig. The Canadian River also presents a natural obstacle, with only a few bridges. There’s a southbound highway farther to the west, but he isn’t confident there will be enough time to make for it and cross ahead of the tornado.
Going east may mean that he will lose sight of it in the rain, but at least he knows he won’t get hit. RaXPol pulls onto a deserted I-40 and motors east, Snyder pushing the diesel to the redline. He can only manage fifty-five miles per hour. The easterly headwinds have become so intense that the antenna not only behaves as a parachute, it stops rotating altogether.
As the team examines the scraps of radar imagery that do make it through, Bluestein notices something curious. In fact, he is positively confounded as they travel along the southern flank of El Reno, past the oil-field-supply depots and the livestock auction. The tornado is now behind them, when it should be somewhere off to the right.
How could this be? If the tornado is moving southeast, and you move east, and suddenly the tornado is west of you, he thinks, what does that mean? The most likely explanation, he concludes, is that the supercell is producing tornadoes cyclically. The vortex they had witnessed earlier must have roped, making way for the new twister, which would form farther to the north—behind RaXPol.
Only later, when Bluestein has had a chance to analyze the data, does he discover that he had been dead wrong. It wasn’t a new tornado. It was the very same beast. Instead of drifting away from them, it had swerved dramatically northeast. “And I thought, Oh, my God,” Bluestein says. He and his crew were one decision away from losing their lives. Against such a strange track, venturing south would have brought them straight into the maw of the storm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
* * *
THE DRAGON’S TAIL
CARL BRAKES AS he approaches the intersection with Reno Road. At 6:12 p.m. they’ve finally arrived at their east route, and just in time. The tornado is roughly three-quarters of a mile away at their ten o’clock. They’re close enough now for a view afforded to few others through the rain. The visible funnel is nearly nine hundred yards wide, but the monster is more than what the eye can perceive. Its unseen circulation, a 2.4-kilometer ring of Category 5 typhoon-strength wind, is no more than half a mile away. And it’s closing. After its initial southeast trajectory, the tornado has started to edge a few degrees northward, heading due east now. They’ll be skirting even closer than they’d planned.
To devote his full attention to the road ahead, Carl passes the DSLR to Tim. He turns left onto Reno, the tornado now visible out the passenger window.
An intercept is not yet out of the question, but Carl knows they will first have to gain on the tornado, pass it, and put some distance in between for the deployment. He needs to drive fast to keep their hopes alive, sixty miles per hour or more down a rain-slicked country road in a hard and veering wind.
Tim is unnerved by their speed, but not because he doubts Carl’s ability to handle the sedan in these conditions—he’s done so many times before. What frightens Tim is the specter of all that can go wrong farther down the line. The tornado, he knows, is like a steel tooth on a coil-spring bear trap. The question is not whether it will snap shut, but when. Once the rear-flank gust front coils around the updraft, it could dislocate the tornado and send it caroming into them, dying but no less deadly. Tim has seen it happen any number of times, and fears they are driving straight into the jaws of the trap.
“Okay, we’ve gotta be careful in case this thing wraps up. . . . I would slow up here, because if this thing starts moving to the north, we’re in trouble,” he says. “Slow up. . . . We’re almost right alongside of it here. Slow up! Let the thing go off to the east a little bit . . . see if that thing transverses us.”
Carl sees nothing but clear road ahead, and he believes they can’t afford to lose any more ground. It is a familiar push and pull between Tim’s relative caution and Carl’s aggression. This is their opportunity to overtake the tornado, he insists.
But what Carl can’t know is that the usual distinctions of vortex anatomy have become virtually meaningless. This is more like the storm Wurman encountered in Geary, Oklahoma, when the DOW became a probe. The entire mesocyclone has sunk to the ground, creating a tornado that’s practically purpose-built to ensnare chasers with its hazy boundaries, torrential rains, and roving pockets of lethal wind.
Even with access to real-time mobile radar, Wurman strayed inside at Geary. Tim and Carl have no such advantage. In fact, it’s apparent they don’t know what they’re looking at from one moment to the next. Is that merely rain, or is it the outer circulation? Is the visible funnel the full tornado, or simply a part of something much larger? How big is this thing? The problem is one of perspective. This is not the kind of tornado they think it is. It does not end where they think it ends. With nothing but their eyes and updates every five minutes from the weather service’s stationary Doppler, their decisions aren’t fully informed.
Shortly after they pass south of the airport, the current shifts suddenly. A stiff headwind out of the east wedges and pries at the hood of the sedan. Without realizing it, they have entered the outer circulation of the tornado.
Tim spies hanging motes of dark chaff in the sky all around them. “We’ve got debris in the air,” he says. As if to drive home his point, something heavy glances off the Cobalt. “That’s the problem.”
Tim sets the camera down on the floorboard, where it remains for the rest of the journey, and he begins to chart a new course.
He instructs Carl to take Reformatory Road, the next north option, shortly before 6:15. Wind and debris continue to batter the sedan. As they reach the corner, it’s unlikely they mark the alteration in vortex structure that occurs at the same moment.
Directly to their south, the storm is pouring rain onto the empty fields, heavier and heavier with each passing second, darkening to the point of opacity. Then, the absolute gray surrounding the tornado breaks and admits a weak light. Alternating bands of rain and wind-cleared air sweep toward the heart of the storm, one after the next. But one of the rain bands is different from the others, cohering, hardening; it isn’t rain. It sweeps down out of the cloud base, dark as onyx, drifting over the fields like the slow lashing of a dragon’s tail.
A careful observer would be able to see the birth of an embedded subvortex—a tornado within the tornado. But Tim, Carl, and Paul are likely too distracted by the unrelenting inflow and their precarious footing to take note. Behind them, the subvortex takes root and begins to trace a near-concentric orbit within the parent tornado. From the Cobalt, it would have been visible for only a moment, then seemingly reabsorbed. But it isn’t done. Before long,
it will return.
* * *
At 6:16 p.m., Josh Wurman levels DOW6 on a short paved drive off State Highway 4, where a steel gate opens onto broad pasturage to the east. The hydraulic outriggers cantilever the bright blue seventy-ton International truck. The 250-kilowatt magnetron transmitter buzzes in the steel-fortified rear cabin. A communications mast periscopes fifty-six feet above, all of it giving the rig the appearance of a Transformer in metamorphosis. Roughly fifteen miles west, far beyond the low, single-story shingle roofs of a suburban Yukon subdivision, the tornado traces a snaking path.
Three miles to the southwest of DOW6, a second unit, the Rapid-Scan DOW, has taken up an ideal position in the farm country, with almost nothing taller than a stalk of wheat between the antenna and the storm. For sampling an eastward mover, the team is well situated, at least for the moment.
Wurman and his colleague Karen Kosiba should be on a plane to Helsinki right now for a conference, but neither could resist the beckoning volatility over the southern plains. Instead, they set out this morning from the Wichita, Kansas, airport with two DOWs and one mesonet vehicle, which members of their team use to deploy Wurman’s pods. Three hours later, they arrived in Norman, Oklahoma. Given the possibility that the tornado would mature by the time it reached the outer-ring suburbs of Oklahoma City, they wanted to be prepared for a rare opportunity to document the relationship between damage and velocity in a population center, an event Wurman’s radar has witnessed only once before. As the storms touched off, Wurman and his team worked their way through the suburbs southeast of here before setting up at the thinning edge of the metro area.
Now, the antenna rotating on its axis, Wurman’s DOW6 has begun to scan. RSDOW follows suit two minutes later. Much of what follows will be discovered only after he has analyzed the radar data in detail.
At around 6:17, DOW6 detects near-concentric tornadic circulations, one 2,000 meters in diameter, and a second 150-meter subvortex nested almost directly within its core flow. This is what Tim, Carl, and Paul would have just been able to glimpse through the rain curtains. By 6:19, other vortices northwest of the parent tornado are ingested into the circulation. Then, a profound evolution takes place. At 6:20, the embedded subvortex becomes dislocated. It drifts from the center toward the farthest boundary of the circulation and embarks on an entirely novel orbit. “It’s hard to know why it changed in structure, from something internal to something external,” Wurman says. “You could speculate, but because it was such a difficult storm, nobody got the data they were hoping for. It was just too hard. There are a lot of questions that probably won’t get answered.”
Those questions will come later, however. For now, across the street from the Canyon Creek subdivision, Wurman peers into the display inside a cramped cabin, cooking in the radiative heat of high-voltage electronics. He knows only that the DOW is reading a baffling and nearly incomprehensible bolus of violent wind. He studies the screen with growing puzzlement, attempting to orient the other DOW and his pod-deployment team in time and space. Yet he can’t discern the pattern. Where will the most violent winds show up a minute from now? Five minutes from now? Even with DOW6 scanning a full 360 degrees every seven seconds, he can’t make sense of any of it. It will be impossible to direct the pod deployment team with any degree of safety. What’s worse, it is clear the subvortex, once unleashed from its tight orbit within the main circulation, contains winds of deadly intensity—well over 200 miles per hour.
Wurman is not going to lead himself or his crew anywhere near velocities like that. “You’d better be careful with that kind of thing,” he says, “because it could kill us.” He calls off his pod deployment team.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
* * *
THE CROSSING
TIM, CARL, AND Paul hit the turn onto Reformatory Road just after 6:15. Rain now rips over the road in dense horizontal sheets. Objects plunge through the air like knots of sparrows. Carl rounds the corner and guns it north, with conditions pushing the Cobalt to its limits. Each second is precious. Whether or not they realize it, the tornado is lunging for them.
The moment they crossed into the core flow, with debris ringing off of the Cobalt’s frame, the vortex snapped its jaws to the northeast, just as Tim had warned. Reformatory becomes an escape route. If not for their turn here, the vehicle would have been overtaken.
Even after Tim has predicted its next move, the hair’s-width margin comes as a shock. This tornado is far larger, and moving far faster, than they could have expected.
The white Cobalt now shoulders through an inflow current like a boat struggling upriver. It’s harrowing driving, but they’re able to open up a buffer. Judging by the chatter in the car, they’re relieved to be out ahead of the beast. They plot their next maneuvers: “Now we go up north,” Tim says, “then east.”
Distance, however, does not gain them perspective. The stiff southbound inflow winds are attended by a slug of rain winding centrifugally around the tornado’s northern flank. What had once been so clear, so readily tracked, quickly dissolves into the gray. Only chasers to the south of the storm can see the tornado now.
As they make their way farther north and plot a new route, Tim’s phone rings. It’s a New York producer with whom he’s been working, calling for an update at a particularly inopportune time. “Yeah, yeah. We’re at . . . the tornado is about five hundred yards away. I really can’t talk right now!” Tim says. “It’s just south of El Reno. It’s gonna be on the ground for a long time, and it’s heading right for Oklahoma City.”
Tim does his level best to end the phone call quickly, but in a burst of pique, it sounds as though he mutters “Goddamnit!” under his breath. He hangs up after forty-five seconds. It must seem like an eternity under the circumstances.
A mile up Reformatory Road, Carl swings east again onto Reuter. They’re still angling for an intercept, even though they’ve been given every reason to abandon it. Between the untimely dead end at the airport, the perilous push to the south, and their brief penetration of the debris core, the chase has proven problematic from the first.
But Tim isn’t the same chaser he was on that dirt road near Last Chance some twenty years ago, or even at Manchester. He’s spent so much time in the presence of violent storms that the old pang of fear has dulled. And while he has often said that nothing scares him more than the tornado he can’t see, he and Carl have penetrated the rain before not knowing what awaited them on the other side. No-man’s-land is where Tim found his greatest victories. He has succeeded by toeing the line between danger and safety. And as he’s gotten better, that instinctual border has drawn closer and closer to the storm’s deadliest winds. He’s broken or stretched chasing’s cautionary rule so many times it no longer has the same hold. He is like the expert climber who knows he can succeed without a rope—who’s felt each hold and scaled each pitch a hundred times. In the back of Tim’s mind, he knows it can always get worse; but his instincts haven’t warned him off today’s chase.
He must be curious. He must want to see what is behind the rain. Tim has never encountered this kind of storm motion before. He has never seen anything that careens to the south, the east, then northeast. Perhaps it is the fog of the chase, but he seems to think they have turned a corner, and that their lot is about to improve. After miles of shuddering over dirt roads, Reuter transitions to asphalt. The vortex seems to be easing more easterly. Now that they’ve established a reasonable buffer, this is their chance to regain lost ground. After a year’s hiatus, perhaps Tim thinks TWISTEX, even in its diminished state, will make history today.
Still, trouble hounds every providential development. For some 500 yards, they drive on in the blind, their view of the storm obstructed by a plains windbreak of thick red cedar. While Carl believes pavement will enable a highway pace, the north–south inflow buffeting the sedan continues to check his speed. The power lines to their right strum in the wind. Maintaining a straight heading requires his complete concentration
. In half a mile, Reuter switches abruptly back to gravel. The Cobalt, built for city driving, not rally-style terrain, handles poorly on the dirt road, shimmying in the wind. In past TWISTEX missions, veteran operators of the mesonet sedans had refused to leave the pavement for this very reason.
Despite these conditions, Carl is determined to outrun whatever hides behind the rain, or at the very least to keep up. He is clocking between forty and fifty miles per hour. Tim seems ill at ease, at one point loudly alerting Carl to an approaching stop sign.
“I see it!” he replies, with a touch of irritation. The men go silent for a while.
The next time Tim speaks, it is to note that the funnel remains out of sight, concealed behind the rain curtain. Without context, an observer could conclude that the dark mass of cloud bears nothing more worrisome than a ruinous deluge for the local dryland wheat crop. At its leading edge, though, the chasers may spot a crescent-shaped penumbra of centrifuged water, lit up by the weak early evening sun. Something is shedding that rain, sending it spiraling onto the plains ahead.
By 6:18, as they near the intersection with Choctaw Avenue, a blue Toyota Yaris pulls onto Reuter from the north, no more than fifty yards ahead. The sound of wind-driven rain hisses against the windshield in swelling and slackening volume. The Cobalt bucks over a railroad crossing and speeds another half mile east before entering the wooded bottomlands that line a spur of Sixmile Creek. Once again, the sight lines to the south are fitfully blinkered by a belt of cottonwood and hackberry. A minute later, US 81, a divided, four-lane highway, lurches into view. At the intersection, Carl brings the Cobalt to a halt behind the Yaris.
Earlier, they had discussed diving south here. If Tim and Carl consult the weather service’s radar feed for evidence of the tornado’s location, the data will be of limited utility now. The last update refreshed nearly five minutes earlier, about the time they wriggled free of the core flow. When they peer south down the highway shortly after 6:19 p.m., the radar’s obsolescence becomes chillingly apparent; they are astonished to see that they have failed to outpace the tornado.
The Man Who Caught the Storm Page 22