CHAPTER TEN
MANCHESTER, SOUTH DAKOTA
IN EARLY 2003, Dr. William Gallus of Iowa State finds himself facing an intractable problem: he needs something that doesn’t exist. In 2001, the professor had broken ground on a new tornado simulator. The machine was to be one of a kind, powered by an eight-foot fan mounted inside a cylinder the size of a subway tunnel. The entire apparatus would be suspended from a five-ton crane inside the university’s Wind Simulation and Testing Laboratory. Not only was it designed to generate wind speeds of up to sixty miles per hour, its vortex would eventually be capable of lateral movement.
An academic with a smooth, boyish face, Gallus is tantalized by the structural-engineering insights the simulator might yield as it translates over model buildings. He envisions revelations that will lead to a fuller grasp of how tornadic winds interact with structures, and how that might ultimately help us to build houses that are more tornado resistant.
The construction project itself, made possible by a National Science Foundation grant, is now complete. But before he can learn anything from it, he has to be sure that the simulation resembles the real thing.
The finest data set he can locate belongs to Joshua Wurman, drawing from his work with mobile Doppler. Wurman succeeded in scanning the entire life cycle of a tornado near Spencer, South Dakota, in 1998, and his data amounts to a high-resolution X-ray of its internal structure and evolution. Only a few years ago, nothing of the sort would have been available to Gallus; Wurman didn’t build his Doppler on Wheels (DOW) until 1995. Now, Gallus is able to compare the Spencer storm to the wind-speed distribution in his simulator, and the results are favorable.
But there is, for the professor’s purposes, one notable limitation to the DOW. Radar operates on line of sight. With distance, the beam becomes obstructed by everything from buildings to the spherical curvature of the planet. As a result, it can only collect data at tens or even hundreds of meters above the ground. Gallus still lacks any way to validate the wind profile at the simulator’s lowest levels—where people live, where houses stand, where he plans to place his model buildings. He’s come up against the same problem that has stymied researchers for decades.
He knows there is only one way to gather such data, and he certainly has no intention of attempting to do so himself. He’s well aware that the danger and difficulty inherent in probe intercepts has been a stumbling block from TOTO to VORTEX. In most quarters of the scientific community, a probe intercept has come to be considered quixotic, likely reckless, and almost certainly impossible.
The two aerospace engineers who report to Gallus have only a limited awareness of this fact. What they do know is that the profile of the vortex is incomplete. Without measurements from the boundary layer of an actual tornado for comparison, their simulator is based on theory—a glorified guesstimate.
“You’re asking for too much,” Gallus says when they push him. He doesn’t know what the solution is, but he knows a dead end when he sees one. “We don’t have wind information at the ground,” he says. And they probably never will.
That’s why Gallus can’t help but chuckle when he reads an email that has been forwarded to him by the Iowa-chapter president of the National Weather Association. Gallus and his colleagues have been busily rounding up guest speakers for the Seventh Annual Severe Storms and Doppler Radar Conference, scheduled for March 2003 in Des Moines. A man named Tim Samaras has written the organizers and made an offer that, to Gallus, betrays more than a little hubris.
Tim has essentially invited himself to the conference, and he’s asking for the chapter to cover his costs. If so, Tim proposes, he will present data he has collected from tornadoes using his turtle probes. He confesses that, as of this writing, he has yet to place one directly inside the core, but Tim is confident he will do so soon.
The email gets passed around among the leadership at NWA. That a prospective speaker has invited himself is the least outlandish aspect of the proposal. It is the nature of his mission that raises eyebrows. Among seasoned field scientists, stating one’s intent to deploy a probe inside a violent twister will surely be met with reflexive skepticism. Especially when the proposer is unassociated with any of the top universities or private research organizations. Gallus and many others have never heard of this Samaras fellow. Yet, standing in the shadow of the field’s top minds, he proclaims that he will accomplish what they never could?
Tim has been told before that he is wasting his time, that the probe intercept is impossible. But even though they have their doubts, Gallus and the others can’t deny the brief pang of excitement at this sign that the dream has not died off completely. Because if by some wild chance Tim does manage to prevail, his data will be priceless.
As Gallus finishes reading Tim’s email, he can’t help thinking, This guy is a yahoo. Yet Gallus has to admire his pluck.
Months later, in a cheap motel room, Tim gazes into the screen of his laptop with road-weary eyes. He and Pat Porter are up again at the crack of dawn, surrounded by a metastasizing accumulation of dirty laundry, in another tiny town somewhere in Nebraska. Tim scans an alphabet soup of acronymed weather models, searching for some clue above the Great Plains. The men scarf down their breakfast—a diner staple of eggs, biscuits, and bacon—as the day’s atmospheric variables flip over in Tim’s mind like a Rubik’s Cube. He’s anxious to get on the road.
Storm chasing is a gamble, and for several weeks now Tim has played the odds, wagering thousands of dollars in gas, lodging, food, and an obscene number of miles ticking ever higher on the odometer of the family Dodge Caravan. He has spent
