In 1951, the Weather Bureau finally set out to solve the problem. They launched the first coordinated effort to understand the cause of tornadoes, the aptly named Tornado Project, which would run through 1953. The bureau constructed a network of instrument stations, called a mesonet, throughout Kansas and Oklahoma, attempting to log the atmospheric conditions preceding and surrounding tornadoes. But over the course of the project, researchers learned precious little about the nature of the tornado. Twisters seemed to be utterly repelled by the network. Even trained scientists couldn’t resist imbuing the storms with anthropomorphic caprice. “Unfortunately for meteorological knowledge,” the project’s leader drily joked, “the setting up of the Tornado Project system seems to have provided the people of Kansas with the best tornado insurance they ever had.”
This first effort set forth a theme that would repeat time and again in the history of tornado research. Tornadoes were the essence of ephemera, often so brief and random that it was as if they conspired to keep their own secrets. From the 1950s to the present, those who have tilted headlong after the vortex itself have, more often than not, caught nothing but air. Fate has instead rewarded those who have been more circumspect, targeting the larger storm or paying no mind to the vortex at all.
Tornado science has proceeded from broad to small, from common to rare. First the thunderstorm was charted and explored; next came the supercell, the specific variety of storm that tends to spin off twisters; only once those two were plumbed did the vortex begin to shed its mystique. From stratosphere to surface level, science would march down the scale. Only at its lowest levels—where Tim has set his sights—does it continue to fend off all comers.
Every tornado is spawned by a thunderstorm, those mammoth atmospheric engines that roar and spark and race across the plains, occasionally channeling their full wrath down upon some tiny hamlet in the sea of grain. By deciphering the puzzle of the thunderstorm, researchers would gain their first important toehold toward understanding the tornado.
Launched in 1945, the Thunderstorm Project, a sister program to the ill-fated Tornado Project, set out to solve another freak weather event that was tormenting the postwar nation. The nascent commercial air industry had just begun to boom, but as it rose, its planes were falling from the sky at astonishing rates. The new craft of choice, the Douglas DC-3, was crashing regularly amid the extreme turbulence of thunderstorms—a rising toll that included one grim disaster that killed a sitting US senator. When Congress called upon the Weather Bureau to stem the crisis, it turned to the esteemed meteorologist Dr. Horace Byers, out of the University of Chicago. And what Byers ultimately discovered would extend well beyond air travel.
Byers’s ambition was nothing short of mapping the wind. Taking advantage of the nation’s postwar surfeit of pilots and aircraft, he assembled his own fleet of ten Northrup P-61Cs, known as Black Widows. He then retrofitted each plane with sensors to track their encounters with violent air currents, and he prepared them to penetrate storms at five elevations, from 5,000 to 25,000 feet. Stiff-winged “night fighters,” designed for navigating by radar in the pitch dark, the P-61Cs were about as rugged as a plane could get in 1945—and Byers put them through the wringer.
The fleet intercepted every malicious thunderhead that formed near the bases of operation in Orlando, Florida, and Wilmington, Ohio—no matter how ominous or how riven with lightning. Through the storm seasons of 1946 and 1947, the pilots encountered seventy-six thunderstorms and conducted nearly 1,400 penetrations. The aircraft were struck by lightning and pummeled by hailstones that left three-inch indentations in metal nose cones and cowlings. They were buffeted by extreme updrafts and downdrafts, one of which shoved a P-61C a vertiginous 500 feet earthward in seconds. Yet for all the stomach-pitching turbulence, not a single pilot was lost.
Through it all, Byers and his team did exactly what he’d hoped—they mapped the storm. To his surprise, he discovered that a thunderstorm was not a solitary, massive edifice, but rather an agglomeration of cells, complete with complex structures and life cycles. It was as if he’d stumbled upon an alien life-form. Up in the clouds—made of clouds—was a being that could grow and divide, feed and die. In his analysis, Byers was able to lay out a model. He charted the set of ethereal ingredients that come together and dissipate with every storm system. And in doing so, he offered science its first step toward being able to know storms and tornadoes as anything but the hand of God.
Each storm, Byers discovered, results from a confluence of moisture, heat, and lift. Warm air near the earth’s surface is unstable: it wants to expand and to rise. As it ascends, it creates a vertical current called an updraft—which can be boosted by the right winds. The updraft builds over time, conducting a stream of warm air into the cooler, upper layers of the atmosphere. Here it inevitably starts to shed its heat, which causes the updraft’s moisture to condense and create a cloud. One can often see cumulus towers billowing up to the ceiling of the sky just before the storm strikes. If the updraft is strong and the air especially warm and moist, the clouds will keep on rising, higher and higher. But once the force of the updraft can no longer support the weight of the condensing water droplets—what goes up must come down.
Byers found that a storm cell is like a lung. The updraft is the inhalation. Now comes the blow. All that moisture hurtles down to the
