Ground-based, mobile Doppler radar was embryonic during the first experiment; the technology has since improved dramatically. Wurman envisions a fleet of mesonets and mobile radars encircling the storm, gathering data from all angles and elevations. Crucially, he shares Tim’s conviction that unless scientists understand the characteristics of the low-level wind flow in tornadoes, we’ll be powerless to guard against them or to create houses and buildings that can stand in the storm. This will require an all-important set of probes rugged enough to survive the worst tornadoes imaginable.
Wurman tells Tim that he’s the best man for designing and placing the mission’s probes.
What Wurman is offering is exactly what Tim needs after Manchester: the opportunity to work hand in glove with top researchers; generous federal funding throughout; a mission whose ambitions are as large as his own; and a perfect chance to build upon his breakthrough. This is the next peak that Tim has been eyeing. It seems as though it should be an easy yes from him.
But as Tim and Wurman get down to talking, something strange happens. A rift forms.
More often than not, Tim is, in the words of Julian Lee, “reverential toward academics, perhaps because he himself did not have the opportunity to pursue a formal higher education path.” But there’s a flip side to this reverence—Tim’s pride despite his lack of degrees. When his work is challenged by decorated figures, he can easily turn cagey and defensive. This doesn’t mesh well with Wurman. The scientist is blunt, and his bedside manner has never been honey dipped.
Also, unbeknownst to Wurman, Tim is already primed to be wary. While the two had collaborated once in the past—coauthoring a conference paper that combined their data on the Stratford, Texas, tornado—Tim was irked by what he perceived as the minor billing his deployment received. As Tim saw things, Wurman treated the turtle as a curiosity whose only purpose was to validate the Doppler on Wheels. Tim wrote to a colleague, “He’s used my data with little/no mention of my efforts, and used it as a tool to promote his efforts against the other mobile radars out there.”
Wurman says Tim never expressed these feelings to him after the publication of their paper, but he confirms that he saw radar as a more important tool than the in-situ probe.
Tim must have sensed Wurman’s perception of the pecking order, and his place in it. Their history left Tim feeling “stepped on,” he writes in an email. Which he might be able to get past. But as Wurman gets into the weeds, he doesn’t succeed in alleviating Tim’s concerns. Wurman tells Tim that he isn’t interested in HITPRs for VORTEX2; instead, he’s looking for Tim to invent cheaper, mass-produced versions of the turtle that can measure wind speed directly. As an inventor himself, Wurman admires the pressure-logging turtle and the elegance of its instrument package. “The thing is,” he says, pressure “is the measurement we least care about. We know the pressure is low in a tornado.”
What we don’t know, Wurman says, is how the tornado’s strongest winds are distributed near the ground. To that end, he doesn’t want to settle for deploying—and landing—just one or two probes per intercept. “These onesie measurements,” he says, “tend not to be too useful.” Instead, he wants a swarm of probes, to capture the strengthening and slackening wind profile of the storm. If Tim’s HITPR is a Lamborghini, Wurman is asking him to assemble a fleet of wind-speed-measuring Chevrolets.
The conversation rubs Tim the wrong way. But the long-term benefits of working with Wurman are impossible to ignore. Despite his reservations, Tim submits a one-page letter of intent to join VORTEX2 on December 3, 2004. He outlines his potential contributions, including his HITPRs and the new media probe, which should be usable to measure wind speed through the right calculations—but he doesn’t mention any new Chevy probes.
In January, he discovers that Wurman has submitted his own letter of intent, which also includes a planned instrument with cameras, what he calls a pod. This sets off alarm bells in Tim’s mind. Right or wrong, he’s convinced that Wurman’s “video pod” is an attempt to outflank the media probe and to underbid Tim’s own proposal. Tim fires off an email to a colleague: “Being that Wurman is on the [VORTEX2] board [one of six] he was able to look at my submitted one-pager, and responded with a one-pager of his own describing HIS version of massive video probes . . . undercutting my cost.” Already suspicious, Tim is now fully spooked. “Did I mention that he was on the V-II board reviewing all the submitted one-pagers?”
For Tim, this is the final straw.
Wurman dismisses the idea that he has undercut Tim’s proposal; he’s simply filling in the gaps Tim wouldn’t. For now, it ends up being a moot point anyway: VORTEX2 needs to be pushed back, as NOAA and the National Science Foundation decline to fund the expedition for the time being.
Regardless, Tim’s position stiffens. He comes to reject Wurman’s criticisms along with the allure of his offer. As Tim sees it, he has a formula that’s been successful. Who else has gotten probes into a tornado? And it has worked with the devices he has in hand, without any higher-up ordering him around. He has been told before that his methods would fail, and the doubters were wrong. He has been told before that he won’t be able to make it as an outsider. But that’s exactly how he has gotten