As of tonight, the tornado has kept its secrets long enough.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DOUBLING DOWN
THE YOUNG BOY in his bedroom, tinkering with old radios; the newbie chaser on the Colorado plains, casing an F0; the engineer at the test range, quantifying the raw violence of missiles and bombs. At every stage it was beyond a long shot to imagine this young man swooping down into the heart of the tornado, succeeding where decades of scientists had failed. Yet at each stage, he was gaining the skills he needed.
Now he’s become the man who accomplished meteorology’s equivalent to the moon landing.
In the aftermath, Tim is the toast of the weather world. National Geographic puts him on the cover, with a full story detailing his exploits. He travels to Chicago to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Next he’s on the CNN set, sitting across from Soledad O’Brien. He’s wearing a clean pair of khakis and a pressed Hawaiian-print button-down. His dark, coffee-colored hair is smooth and neatly parted, for once not windblown.
For Tim, the most important event is the Conference on Severe Local Storms, the atmospheric-science equivalent to the Academy Awards, which he and Julian Lee attend over a year after Manchester. The conference is a kind of coming-out party for the bleeding edge of severe-weather research, attended by the most august atmospheric scientists in the world. Tim and Lee unveil the first data of its kind—pressure, temperature, and humidity measurements from inside the core of an F4. Tim’s probe has proven so capable that in its data log one can see even the brief deviation in pressure caused by Harold’s farmhouse, as the tornado chewed through it and across the probe.
Their reception at the conference is resounding; the conclave of scientists is completely won over by Tim’s findings. “It’s extremely valuable,” says Dr. Al Bedard, the senior NOAA scientist behind TOTO. “My perspective is that this was the first time a direct measurement was ever made.” After years of cool skepticism, Tim basks in recognition and praise. His spiritual predecessors—Bedard, Howie Bluestein, and Joe Golden, the very men who inspired him from the beginning—offer sincere encouragements for him to continue his work.
Tim wants nothing more than to do just that. With the Manchester deployment, he has broken through the psychic hurdle that had dogged him and every severe-weather researcher from the very start. He has snatched fire from the god of the plains. And now, despite the clear dangers he faced in Manchester, South Dakota, and Stratford, Texas, his success only compels him to continue pushing forward. He bears the torch, and he can’t fathom quitting the odds game Anton Seimon left back in Stratford.
Tim can return to the plains and do it again, he thinks. He can do it better. As long as he keeps the tornado in sight and establishes a reasonable buffer, the odds swing in his favor. He can capture an F5. He can invent new probes and collaborate with new scientists to gather more and more-complete data. Like the mountaineer who finally conquers an untouchable summit, Tim’s eye is already on the next peak.
But the path forward is not so clear now. The big breakthrough has been made, and the next set of goals is different. Repetition, precision, and control are the keys to turning a daring exploit into sound science. Now that he’s proven what’s possible, he must leave behind his lone-wolf ways and collaborate. There are visionary scientists who can bend his ingenuity and chasing skill toward the field’s most pressing questions: What is the signal, the mechanism in the atmosphere, that distinguishes a standard supercell from one that creates a twister? What dread signs mark those unforgettable days when tornadoes measure a mile across and scorch the prairie for hours at a time? These mysteries and others have bedeviled mankind since before Tim was born. But if he can repeat his core deployment and collaborate with others studying different parts of the storm, they finally have a new and long-sought-after tool to crack open these questions after years of stasis.
The most vexing question for Tim, though, is whether what got him here can sustain him, or whether he will need to change. His goals expand after Manchester, as he steps onto the scientific main stage. His drive will keep intensifying in turn, and his determination will continue drawing him closer toward the storm. But as much as he is galvanized by recognition from luminaries like Bedard and Bluestein, it’s also true that he has long been fueled by his role as an outsider. He is brilliant but has long avoided the traditional route. He is confident and a strong leader, but he doesn’t like taking second billing. He admires pedigreed scientists, but he can be thorny and self-conscious in their presence. He works hardest when someone tells him that something can’t be done.
Now that he has made his name, can he fold himself into the role that the next scientific advance will require?
The first hint of an answer comes nine months after Manchester, when Tim arrives at the Iowa State lab of Professor Bill Gallus, the scientist who had written him off as a “yahoo.” Gallus had cringed initially at the thought of collaborating with Tim: He’s a chaser, not a scientist. But Gallus’s engineers have continued to hound him about the blind spot in his simulator. “Could this be the guy who has the data we need?” they ask. As news of Tim’s incredible measurement races through the research community, eventually Gallus gives in. What other choice does he have? There’s only one ground-level data set from the core of a violent twister in existence, and it belongs to Samaras.
As Tim walks into Gallus’s simulator facility in Ames, Iowa, the professor is nervous. He’s preemptively embarrassed for Tim, worried that this hobbyist will be out of his depth among the engineers and the arcane language of
