This is Tim’s final chance to choose Wurman’s path, to avail himself of every resource, every tool he could never afford. He’d be contributing to a mission that not only includes probes and mesonets, but radar trucks, weather-balloon launch vans, unmanned aerial drones, damage surveyors—a diversity of observing platforms that has never before been deployed on tornadic storms. But if he accepts, he’ll be bumped back down to role-player status. It could be 2001 all over again—one head in a much larger herd, swept along wherever it leads.
As he weighs his options, there’s another argument for Tim to consider, lurking just below the surface. Neither man mentions the prospect of death. But even for someone as skilled as Tim Samaras, there are storms out there that can’t be understood with one’s eyes alone. Mobile-radar technologies aren’t just another way of looking at the storm, they can make operating near tornadoes a great deal safer.
Tim should be factoring this in.
Wurman himself is exhibit A, carrying with him a famous story of his own brush with a disastrous storm near Geary, Oklahoma—where his million-dollar machine became an unintentional probe with Wurman and his crew trapped inside.
It was on May 29, 2004, just west of Oklahoma City. Wurman and his DOW encountered a multiple-vortex mesocyclone, or MVMC—the term Wurman would later coin for a broad tornado containing one or several intense subvortices. He was having trouble figuring out the structure of this storm; it was like a mesocyclone on the ground, streaked with roving pockets of deadly wind. By the time he realized he had ventured too close, it was too late: DOW had entered the main circulation. His vehicle was engulfed by winds so violent that they wrenched a closed door from the frame of the stout truck. Terrifying as it was, this part of the storm was probably survivable. The main circulation appeared to be roughly a mile across; it was the subvortex, though, that worried him. It fluctuated in width from between 200 and 800 meters, raking the prairie in complex cycloidal loops that were difficult to decipher in real time. Only by using the radar images on his screen was Wurman able to get an edge. He called out directions to the driver and was able to evade the subvortex that held the tornado’s strongest winds.
Without the DOW, Wurman would have been blind. The feed from the nearest weather-service radar might not have picked up the subvortex at all. And even if it could have resolved the structure, by the time the next radar update arrived—usually once every five minutes—it would have been too late. The day might easily have ended differently. “We had our choice of hazard because of the mobile radar data: bad or worse?”
If Tim joins Wurman, he will have the insurance of DOW’s watchful and all-seeing eye, a crucial fallback tool if he ever strays too close to a storm. Without Wurman, Tim is stuck relying on five-minute radar scans. And then what?
Tim knows that mobile radar can offer an extra layer of certainty within a storm—he’s had chaser friends who’ve made great use of it. But whether he factors this into his decision in Aurora, we can’t know. What we do know is that Tim remains wary of Wurman, that Tim remembers all too well the agony of 2001, that he ascribes his success in 2003 to his independence, and that his heart is already with the team of obsessives he has strung together.
When he says no to VORTEX2, Wurman is shocked—but more so, disappointed. “Maybe he thought he was being bullied when we were all in the same room, telling him to do something different,” Wurman says. His warnings—about Tim’s funding and hardware—were well meant, from the scientist’s perspective, even if they failed to land.
Both parties move on.
Wurman decides that it’s time to undertake probe construction himself. He’s not the engineering whiz that Tim is, but the in situ model is too important not to follow now that it’s been proven. “I got in the Pod business reluctantly because Tim’s design and strategy didn’t seem likely to answer the scientific questions that needed answering,” Wurman says. He’s hoping that his Doppler on Wheels combined with new in situ pods will allow for a comprehensive, unparalleled map of the vortex.
Tim and his crew don’t miss a beat. The 2006 test run with Bruce Lee and Cathy Finley performed well, even in a fairly uneventful season. The team formed a budding friendship and spirits were high. In their minds, Wurman and his convoy can take up the whole highway if they like; Tim’s upstarts will stick to the gravel road.
On April 9, 2007, Tim sends an email to his partners to make the collaboration official. Every research mission should have a name, or at least a tortured acronym, so they decide to christen their creation.
Bruce and I have been batting around a few terms to use for our fielding this year. This is what we’ve come up with to date:
Tactical
Weather
Instrumented
Sampling in/near
Tornadoes
Basically, “TWIST.”
TWIST sounds a little truncated to Tim’s ear, and he proposes a slight tweak:
What do you think about adding the EX (for EXperiment) to arrive at:
“TWISTEX”?
They all agree. To Wurman’s VORTEX2, Tim now has the one and only TWISTEX.
The inaugural 2007 season provides an object lesson in the elusory nature of the twister. The first big tornado of the year will surely go down in chaser legend. On May 4, a 1.7-mile-wide EF5 effectively wipes Greensburg, Kansas, from the map—but TWISTEX is nowhere near the action. Lee and Finley’s young mesonet drivers are still buried under final exams. For the remainder of the season, apart from a second EF5 in Manitoba, Canada—where the team doesn’t have approval to operate—no other significant tornadoes touch down in the plains.
In a last-ditch effort, Tim applies
