But once again, Gallus has underestimated Tim. Far from floundering, he is positively bursting with insight. To the shock of Gallus’s lab, Tim is an engineer. He speaks the language, and what’s more, he’s entranced by Iowa State’s mighty machine.
The first time Gallus cranks up the simulator, the look on Tim’s face is one of utter enchantment, “like a kid in a candy store.” He marvels at how much the vortex resembles the Manchester monster. The way the dry-ice clouds feed into the vortex at lower levels, it’s as if he’s been transported back to a dirt road on the South Dakota plains.
“Can I put my probe in the path of your tornado?” he asks.
The engineers are chagrined. The minor winds produced by their artificial twister might register as only the most meager blip on HITPR. But Tim insists. He hauls out a turtle and places it onto the platform beneath the simulator. As the fan roars to life and the vaporous vortex translates over the loud-orange cone, Tim is ecstatic. The pressure fall is minuscule next to that of Manchester—about three millibars compared to one hundred—but its contours are eerily similar.
Over the course of the meeting Gallus’s concerns about Tim’s competency are thoroughly put to rest. Both come to appreciate the other’s strengths—and in the presence of Iowa State’s undulating dry-ice tornado, a partnership is forged. Gallus sets to writing a grant proposal to NOAA to fund Tim’s probe-fielding attempts. In exchange, Tim will feed Gallus more raw data from real-life tornadoes. Tim’s Manchester data set will allow Gallus to finalize his simulator, and in the coming years it will be used to better understand the complex interactions between structures and tornadic wind fields. As Tim gathers further data, it will serve as the foundation for numerical models that explain the anatomy of all manner of vortices chasers see in the field.
Tim’s agreement with Gallus is promising, but in some ways it also underscores the handicap of Tim’s background. It is unlikely Tim will ever secure a federal research grant on his own. A National Science Foundation reviewer would “shoot him down,” Gallus says, based not on the relative strength of his ideas and abilities, but on the weakness of his academic pedigree. It’s a fateful truth about Tim’s new position. The closer one gets to the exclusive club at the top of the field, the more one is judged, as Julian Lee puts it, by “the number of letters you have after your name.” Tim has little choice but to rely on others for funding.
Yet even in academia, Gallus is facing limitations of his own: the pool of money for tornado research is shallow these days, and there are bigger fish ahead of him. Between what Gallus can provide and a new round of funding from NatGeo, Tim’s expenses will be largely covered for the upcoming season, but he’ll be working for free. Paid vacation from ARA will only get him so far before company policy requires that he take an unpaid leave of absence.
Tim wants more than just to scrape by post-Manchester. It’s not just about the thrill of the chase anymore. He wants to build a base of knowledge that can leapfrog structural engineers forward, that can tamp down the death and destruction caused by tornadoes. For his mighty ambitions, he will need a high-profile partner, one with resources. Look at what he’s done without them. Imagine what we could do together, he wants to shout. Tim is already making his next moves. He is working on a new probe—larger than HITPR but just as durable, containing seven video cameras that can record simultaneously. Tim calls it the media probe. Six lateral cameras peer through apertures from behind Lexan screens. The seventh is angled vertically. Not only could the probe provide an unparalleled glimpse of the tornado core, it could, by tracking debris across multiple lenses, yield an even more accurate estimate of the tornado core flow than Tim’s turtle.
In the late spring of 2004, near Storm Lake, Iowa, Tim succeeds in placing a prototype media probe inside an F3 tornado. The camera peers into an inhospitable place in which seemingly every centimeter of air boils with grass and soil and even larger objects, including a corn bin. The sound of it is like the crowning of a forest fire.
Just a year after his one-of-a-kind data, he has landed another tornado core and gathered one-of-a-kind footage. Tim’s successes are coming in quick succession now. His name is on the lips of every active storm researcher.
It isn’t long before one of the field’s biggest whales, Josh Wurman, founder of the Center for Severe Weather Research, reaches out to Tim. The two had worked together briefly to analyze the Stratford tornado a couple of years back, and Tim knows Wurman’s reputation well. The senior scientist is one of the perennial players in tornado research, reliably on the receiving end any time research dollars are on the line. After earning his doctorate at MIT, Wurman constructed the first ground-based, mobile Doppler platform in 1994, enabling him to haul a radar as powerful as any research installation’s out into the field, where it’s needed most. His Doppler on Wheels (or DOW) and similar mobile Dopplers developed by Howie Bluestein and others revealed things no weather-service radar had ever successfully imaged before. Wurman, for instance, holds the record for the fastest tornado wind speed ever captured, at 301 miles per hour.
Yet as much as mobile Doppler has offered, Wurman knows all too well that new angles on the tornado are needed for the full picture to come together. Chief among those is the near-surface level. Here, Tim is not just the leader. He is, Wurman says, “the only serious player.”
That’s why Wurman approaches
