Bedard didn’t need to belabor the importance of such a new tool. It might have been half-raving, but Bluestein signed on to the endeavor. So the next evolutionary leap in tornado research—or perhaps its most frustrating period of all—got its start over cocktails.
By 1980, Bedard had constructed the instrument package: it was an ungainly cylinder roughly the size of an oil drum, made of half-inch-thick aluminum plate. The Totable Tornado Observatory would house sensors for measuring pressure, temperature, humidity, and wind speed, hardened enough to withstand velocities exceeding two hundred miles per hour. Because deploying in the path of a tornado was bound to be a frightful experience—and Bedard did not intend to deploy TOTO himself—he sought to make the process as foolproof as possible. Lying horizontally in the back of a pickup, the sensors would remain inactive. But as soon as TOTO was upright and winched down a ramp into place, the battery would kick in and its sensors would start recording.
In preliminary field trials in the summer of 1980, Bluestein tweaked the hardware and improved on Bedard’s deployment technique, until he could unload TOTO in roughly a minute. Then, in 1981, scientists at NSSL and the University of Oklahoma started chasing storms. They used a government van with TOTO’s bulky frame strapped down in the back. In an era predating cellular networks, Bluestein fed quarters into pay phones for storm updates from NSSL. When it was showtime, he chased by sight and chose his deployments carefully. They only had one chance, one probe, after all; and TOTO required relatively firm, level surfaces. Mindful of potential sources of debris that could strike the instrument, Bluestein was also conscious to avoid barns and trees.
For three consecutive seasons he chased, with success always just out of reach. In 1982, he was racing to get ahead of a fast-moving storm when he realized he was on a collision course. As he began to turn back, the tornado roared into view, snatching telephone poles out of the ground and flaying a nearby mobile home. He’d gotten close, but too damned close to deploy. During one infuriating chase, he pursued a tornado sitting over Altus Air Force Base in southern Oklahoma. Before the team could get into position, the tornado lifted without warning. This wasn’t that unusual; the storm seemed to be producing twisters cyclically, so Bluestein continued ahead to where the next was likely to drop. We’ll get this one this time, he told himself. But instead of the usual southwest-to-northeast track, the new tornado darted off to the northwest, eluding TOTO. “It was teasing us,” Bluestein laughed. “Catch me if you can!”
By 1983, Bluestein had begun to despair. Short on hope and long on frustration, his group had TOTO tested in a wind tunnel at Texas A&M to calibrate its sensors and to determine its tip-over threshold. The results weren’t terribly encouraging. Unless anchored or widened, a hundred-mile-per-hour gale would upend the top-heavy cylinder—the kind of wind you’d see in even a moderate tornado. By the end of the season, Bluestein turned TOTO over to other scientists at NSSL. After years of close calls and frustrating misses he was finished with this dangerous game.
For all the long miles logged, the device got tantalizingly close only once. Near Ardmore, Oklahoma, the following year, the NSSL team deployed TOTO on the outer edge of a weak tornado. The instrument promptly pitched over onto its side, damaging the sensors.
In every sense, Bluestein felt as though they had been tilting at windmills. The Totable Tornado Observatory was retired for good in 1987. “I said, ‘I give up. Forget it,’ ” Bluestein recalls. “There are easier ways to do this.’ ”
The way he chose was mobile radar, which had become increasingly viable and cost-effective in recent years. The upside was obvious: One could still get around the 4,000-year odds, but the intercept was no longer an all-or-nothing proposition. Bluestein could keep his distance and position a mobile dish anywhere near the tornado, rather than only in its path. It wasn’t a replacement for TOTO so much as another path altogether. “It would be fascinating to actually get inside the tornado and take a look around,” he said. “Since we can’t, we try to get close enough to aim our portable radar unit and measure the wind field in and around the tornado.” Later, after Dr. Josh Wurman proved that the larger, more powerful Doppler radar could be adapted to the road, Bluestein mounted a heftier dish to the back of a passenger van. Where stationary Doppler would scan from dozens of miles away, Bluestein could haul his antenna to within a mile of the storm. With it, he achieved one of the first major breakthroughs in years. F5 velocities had previously been inferred indirectly through photographic analysis and damage assessments. His mobile radar, hauled into range of the funnel, proved that tornadic winds were far stronger than scientists had previously thought.
As mobile radar proliferated, a string of new findings followed, from Bluestein, Wurman, and others. The new technology triggered a badly needed fertile period for the battered and bruised researchers. But the radar’s beam still couldn’t reach the place TOTO was designed to go, where the tornado and our world meet.
Even as the twenty-first century neared, there were no accepted theories for how tornadoes
