Tim took a chance at Manchester. He left behind the smooth, easy pavement of the highway and picked up a muddy gravel road. He made a bet on his own ability, on his wiles, on his force of will. And it paid off.
Now, he decides to make the same bet again. If he’s not fit for Wurman’s project, to hell with it. Tim will take inspiration from VORTEX2 and adapt it to his own strengths. He will make his own team—agile, wily, with Tim guiding its movements and his own deployments. He’ll create a rival to VORTEX2 and the club of elite meteorologists.
This is his gravel-road option. He decides he doesn’t need to fold himself into anyone else’s system. He’ll head off the storm’s greatest mysteries using a route that no one else would dare take.
Tim leaves the easy road and crosses over into the mud. He slams the gas and doesn’t look back. The decision to spurn Wurman seems small at the time—but its consequences will feed and spiral.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A TEAM OF UPSTARTS
IN 2005, TIM starts bringing together his collaborators. He’s looking for scientists whose mission complements his own, who are tackling questions he and his turtles can’t address alone. Their combined efforts will create a full picture of a tornado, inside the core and out. If VORTEX2 can leverage repeat measurements of the complete tornadic environment to resolve questions that have long stumped researchers, so can Tim’s mission. Throughout the spring, a first-rate scientific team emerges, with a distinctly Samaras character: trim, dedicated, tight-knit, and with a bit of a chip on its shoulder.
First and foremost, Tim has in mind a woman he met last year. In April 2004, he had been scheduled to speak at NOAA’s Northern Plains Convective Workshop in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. During dinner after the first day’s presentations, he ended up sitting next to Cathy Finley, a kindred spirit who ran a tornado-research program with her partner, a scientist named Bruce Lee. As she explained to Tim, their data-gathering strategy was to sample the near-tornado environment by surrounding the funnel with sedan-mounted weather stations called mobile mesonets. Tim had listened raptly. Their team sounded a great deal like his own efforts—nimble, independent, unafraid to venture beneath the shadow of the mesocyclone. This was a woman after his own heart.
Her career trajectory had lately taken an unforeseen turn, she explained. She and Lee had recently resigned from the University of Northern Colorado, having grown weary of fighting the administration for every dollar the school’s small meteorology department deserved. Since then, they’d been working in the private sector, with a company in Minnesota. Wind farms and solar arrays, as it turned out, were in desperate need of meteorological advice. Both she and Lee had been raised in the state, which made this a welcome homecoming as well.
Throughout, neither of them had given up on their first love: severe storms. Finley grew up in Benson, a small farming hamlet situated along the Chippewa River, not twenty miles from the South Dakota border. As a little girl, she had been frightened by thunder. But as she grew older, the thing she feared most came to fascinate her. It would ever more be a prime focus of her life.
As they chatted over dinner, Tim and Finley discovered they had much in common. Conducting hard research while earning a living in the private sector, they agreed, was a struggle without end. As talk turned to Manchester, they realized their paths had nearly crossed at Harold’s farmstead. While Tim was pulling up to what remained of the house, Finley and Lee were just leaving. In fact, one of their students had nearly stepped on the turtle. At the close of the 2004 conference, Tim and Finley had bade each other a fond farewell.
Now, more than a year later, their conversation remains lodged in Tim’s mind. In mid-2005, he decides to hunt down her contact information. He writes to ask whether she and Bruce Lee would be interested in a joint field operation. Perhaps, he suggests, they should start their own “mini-VORTEX project” during the 2006 season.
Collaborating with Lee and Finley is an ideal fit for Tim. Their missions are parallel and complementary, affording Tim all the benefits of working with scientists as astute as Wurman, but without sacrificing his autonomy. Furthermore, Julian Lee has now moved on from ARA, so Tim needs someone to do the complex math and draw scientific conclusions from his data.
Partnership makes perfect sense to Lee and Finley as well. In an intensely clubby field, where egos swell, here is a man they can work with. The researchers are tackling the storm on different scales, but they’re pieces of the same puzzle. Tim is attempting to draw out the inner workings of the tornado and how it behaves at ground level. Lee and Finley are trying to figure out what creates the tornado. What sustains it? What kills it off? What supercharges it? The answers to these questions could one day aid forecasters, while Tim’s work could help vortex modelers and structural engineers. Both prongs cover some of the most vexing mysteries left in storm science. Together, they form a complete package.
Like Tim’s rotating cast of chasers, Lee and Finley’s is a humble outfit. Their toolbox consists of three mobile mesonets—atmospheric-sensor racks that look as though someone tore the plumbing out of the kitchen sink and strapped it to the top of a sedan. The largest component is a doglegging section of PVC pipe that ingests air past a thermometer and hygrometer (used to measure relative humidity), before exhausting it out the other end with a fan. At the top of the rack, an anemometer angles into the wind like a propellered weather vane, tracking wind speed. The whole rig—like a giant tongue used to savor different characteristics in the air—is secured to a sturdy Yakima bike rack, mounted to the top of a Chevy Cobalt, favored by Lee and Finley because it’s one of the
