But it is not the ingenuity of the tool, in this instance, that makes or breaks a deployment. It’s execution, timing, and focus; the right mesonet spacing and coordination can offer whole new dimensions of data on a tornado. They can’t tackle whole storms like the research groups supplied with millions of federal dollars. Instead, they’ve taken on a narrower slice.
What fascinates Finley and Lee most is a second downdraft that forms when the prevailing winds, roughly four miles above the surface, slam into the rear flank of the mesocyclone and are forced violently downward. Known as the rear-flank downdraft (RFD), this current of wind hurtling toward the surface is both drier and warmer than a normal, rain-filled downdraft. The phenomenon—the focus of Finley’s dissertation at Colorado State University—has drawn in both Finley and Lee because RFD surges seem to correlate with tornado formation, and they likewise seem to be associated with intensification. They could be the accelerant thrown onto the fire, transforming strong tornadoes into beasts like at Manchester. But they’re still poorly understood.
“It turned out to be a really big issue in the field,” Lee says. “In terms of cost-benefit ratio, we got a lot of benefit out of a small budget.” Even so, they’ll need many more chases, and many more data sets. Repetition is what it’ll take to pin down whether the RFD is indeed what’s driving formation or intensification. “People think it’s easy to get these measurements, but it’s actually quite difficult,” Lee says. “That’s why you have to do it for a lot of years and accumulate enough cases to make generalizations. You get snippets of data. Or the road network might preclude you from positioning where you need to be. The storm may not cooperate. It takes a long time to collect enough data to say something.”
Tim sympathizes with their plight. Manchester was a groundbreaking achievement, but he too needs to build up a larger data set before his work will translate that into real progress for people who are caught in the path of the storm. The arrival of Lee and Finley into his life must feel like salvation. Not only do they understand, they are living his experience, his frustrations—they’re fellow travelers along the same path.
Truth be told, what excites Finley most about partnering with Tim is the prospect of strapping a mesonet rack to the top of his chase vehicle. He ventures into regions of the storm that scare her and just about every other researcher in the field. “Nobody collects data there,” Finley jokes, “unless it’s by accident.”
Bill Gallus, the Iowa State professor, is the next addition to the team. He and Tim have been collaborating on probe data successfully for over a year, and it’s an easy decision for Gallus to stay on. He now agrees to supply Lee and Finley with apprentices and mesonet drivers, drawing on his ranks of eager graduate students.
The other permanent member of Tim’s squadron is a chase partner named Carl Young, whose obsession might burn even more brightly than Tim’s. A University of Nevada at Reno grad student, Young conducted the environmental analysis of the Manchester tornado and has lately become a fixture at Tim’s side.
Both a talented forecaster and a hardened road warrior, he’s the only chaser Tim has hunted with who can match his legendary stamina. They met at a meteorological conference in 2002, and it was Tim who encouraged Carl to focus his graduate studies on the near-surface tornado environment.
Carl was raised on the West Coast and had tried his hand at a number of odd jobs—an economics major turned insurance-claims agent turned wedding photographer. He even gave acting a shot, though his only significant appearance was a brief part in the 1997 film Against the Law, starring Richard Grieco and Nancy Allen. Carl’s character was killed in the climactic scene, and it soon became clear that his acting career wasn’t going to survive either.
His life rounded another corner in 1998, just shy of his thirtieth birthday, when he was involved in a terrifying car accident. The experience impressed upon Carl the fragility of his life and prompted him to leave California, heading east. As a boy, he had loved to watch the summer thunderstorms whip whitecaps on Lake Tahoe. And as he recovered from his injuries and began his life again, he had a newfound urge to see the real monsters out on the Great Plains. Over the course of two months he logged 25,000 miles, chasing storms up and down Tornado Alley, and as far afield as the East Coast. In the days before smartphones, he’d call his father and ask for updates from the Storm Prediction Center, or for the shape of the supercell on radar. His constant refrain was “Do you see a hook [echo]? Do you see a hook?”—the telltale sign of a supercell with tornadic potential.
Young returned to Lake Tahoe after that summer a changed man. Weather, he determined, would become the focus of his life. He enrolled in Lake Tahoe Community College to get his prerequisite courses out of the way, then was accepted to a master’s atmospheric science program at the University of Nevada, Reno. His professors soon discovered their student was a fanatical storm chaser. Come May, he had his priorities, and he struggled mightily when final exams conflicted with the peak of tornado season.
Carl had no interest in being cooped up in a lab, it turned out. The real science was outside, to be seen and felt and smelled and heard. Storms left room for precious little else in his life. He taught a few meteorology classes at the community college in the off-season and served briefly as the program director for the environmental organization League to Save Lake Tahoe. The position, however, quickly became untenable due to his lengthy absences during tornado season.
In 2002, he was
