Temperature, pressure, humidity—these measurements were all off-limits to mobile radar. They were essential to lingering questions about how tornadoes form and behave, and there was only one viable way to get at them. Even so, Bluestein was done with in situ probes; and few scientists seriously considered them anymore. They’d watched Bluestein’s and Winn’s efforts fail and wanted no part of this work. After decades of battle, the storm had won: it would keep its secrets—for now.
CHAPTER SIX
THE COWBOY SCIENCE
TIM SAMARAS MAKES himself a student of the TOTO project’s ill-fated history. He studies the strengths and flaws of its probe and the VORTEX mission’s successor. As he conceptualizes his own device, he becomes familiar with the names, many of them the world’s foremost experts, who have tried and failed to pierce the violent tornado core. He learns to look at the gargantuan odds calmly, resolutely. He is well aware that, apart from the little notice in Commerce Business Daily, the scientific community has largely given up on in situ probes.
But Tim is not of the scientific community. He’s simply a chaser—one who has seen monster storms and their consequences firsthand. Chasers such as Tim are often all-too-well acquainted with the human toll their quarry exacts; they’ll usually beat first responders to the scenes of horrific tornado disasters. Tim has witnessed the cost this past decade. He has also felt the spark of hope and purpose offered by working with Tatom’s snail. Now, Tim believes he can help in his own way. He sets out to design a probe that could make history.
In his world, wind is nothing more than air rushing from high pressure to low. It’s not so different from the pressure front of a blast wave. Tim’s career is largely a decades-long succession of discrete blasts—Patriot missiles, bunker busters, tons of ANFO, simulated jet-fuel-vapor explosions—each with its own distinctive waveform. Since the day he walked into Larry Brown’s office, Tim has been preparing, learning to capture each gusting shock. The sensors he uses are generally the same, and they should be perfectly adaptable to a tornadic flow field.
But the real puzzle, he finds as he sets to work, won’t be measuring the wind; it’ll be keeping the damn probe on the ground. Despite TOTO’s inelegant bulk, wind in the core can imbue even a 400-pound barrel with aerodynamic properties. If the tornado tosses Tim’s hardware like a Frisbee, it won’t matter whether his data-acquisition software is a work of art.
If the wing of an aircraft is the perfect form with which to harness aerodynamic force, Tim needs a shape that is its antithesis, an object that responds to an intense flow with something like the opposite of lift. The DRI team has recently been absorbed by the defense contractor Applied Research Associates, and someone at the larger shop must have experience with lift- and drag-resistant shapes.
Tim throws himself into probe research for much of 1998, mulling the conundrum and digging through the firm’s past contracts for inspiration. The work is nothing less than the full synthesis of his skills—the exact point where the test range meets the high plains. No one with Tim’s unusual background has ever shouldered the challenge of in situ probe design, much less its deployment. So the answer he finally strikes upon is one that is unlikely to have occurred to anyone but Tim.
Seven years earlier, Roy Heyman, an old-timer who consults for ARA, developed plans for an intercontinental ballistic missile launch vehicle whose shape could shed the shock wave of a nuclear device. Apart from searing-hot radiation and fallout, the immediate dangers were the blast wave’s extreme drag and lift forces, which could cause the launcher to tumble and take flight. When air flows around an object, it bends and accelerates, reducing the pressure above the obstruction. If the mass of the launcher can’t overcome the intensity of the flow—which in an atom bomb’s shock front would be incredibly intense—you’ve got lift, just as with an airplane’s wing. Meanwhile, on the leeward side of the launcher, a wake forms due to the interrupted flow, creating suction, or drag. With higher pressures at the front and lower pressures behind, the blast wave would loft, push, and flip the launcher. This is the last thing soldiers manning an ICBM need.
The trick in Heyman’s design was to get the air to bend as little as possible—nothing more than a gentle deviation—which would minimize the wake and counteract the lifting force. Of all the cubes, polygonal blocks, and cylinders he tested, the humble cone proved the most obdurate. Or at least it did in theory; the project never made it past the first phase of development. For Tim, however, it presents a perfect blueprint.
If Heyman’s shape can survive nuclear war, surely, with a few tweaks, it can stand up to a plains twister. Tim adopts it as the basis for a design and moves on to the next problem.
The wind’s debris cloud, choked with all manner of terrestrial objects turned missile, will be equally life threatening to his probe. So, to play it safe, Tim decides on quarter-inch-thick mild
