His mother doesn’t so much mind the chasing. For all her misgivings, it warms her heart to see how close Tim and Paul have become, united by a common mission. Again she worries when she sees clips from deployments like Tipton, where the margin of error seems so narrow. But then, Kathy knows, she’s not the expert. She’s never been storm chasing. “I didn’t understand how they moved,” she says. “I always figured [Tim] knew not to get too close.”
Even so, she speaks in no uncertain terms about the ground rules when Paul joins TWISTEX—never risk their child’s safety, no matter how worthy the cause. Tim understands, in the marrow of his bones, but she drives her point home with unmistakable clarity: “You have my only son.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WARNINGS
BY THE TIME VORTEX2 is ramping up for its debut in 2009, TWISTEX has already gotten a serious head start. The 2008 season was a bountiful one for Tim’s team. The Quinter tornado was a bracing experience for Lee and Finley, but the storm also contained some of the warmest temperatures they’ve ever heard of inside a rear-flank downdraft. Sifting through the mesonet data, they can only describe the quantity of latent heat inside the RFD surge as “astronomical.” “Clearly, it’s getting air from some other source, and it was dramatic,” Lee says. This sample seems to bear out their hunch that the warm downdraft air isn’t falling so much as being driven. If the tornado’s explosive growth following the surge is any indication, Lee and Finley have amassed their first well-recorded case in which this unique downdraft has been associated with the drastic intensification of an already violent storm.
The week following Quinter, Tim celebrated the intercept near Tipton, Kansas, with Paul and Carl. The media probe logged a direct hit, and a nearby turtle’s pressure trace seems to have detected a series of secondary vortices following on the heels of the EF1 tornado. The findings derived from HITPR, the media probe, and mesonet data will be published in the American Meteorological Society’s prestigious Monthly Weather Review.
From the beginning, TWISTEX’s objective has been to observe all range of storms—monsters like Quinter, and even relatively minor events like Tipton—so that its members might better understand the features these tornadoes share and, perhaps just as important, the ones they don’t. The group is already making progress.
But on the cusp of the 2009 season, the well runs dry. For the first time since the earliest days of the turtle, the National Geographic Society has declined Tim’s grant request. A relationship that has lasted for six years ends, for the time being, rather abruptly. “Obviously, it was not an easy decision,” says Rebecca Martin, director of the society’s Expeditions Council. “But with limited funds we do have to make hard choices.”
For the moment, Tim can still count on Bill Gallus as an ardent supporter, though Tim knows that Iowa State’s NOAA grant will not field the entire team. He has gathered other revenue streams over the years—small endorsements and merchandising deals—but they are usually made in exchange for free gear, not operational cash. Unless he can round up a new sponsor, the future of TWISTEX suddenly looks uncertain.
As if one calamity weren’t enough, the bad news lands at a time when Tim’s probe program seems to be faltering as well. The instinctual calculus that guides Tim in the field is lately placing him at odds with his scientific mission. Deploy too early and he misses the tornado. Deploy too late and he doesn’t get out in time. His talent has always been for straddling the line between. He takes into account the road network, the tornado’s trajectory, and its forward speed. And unless he arrives at something like certainty, he won’t step out onto a patch of ground that in minutes—or seconds—will be exposed to winds capable of removing a house from its foundation.
Bill Gallus understands that this means the deployment of certain devices must be prioritized above others. But in recent intercepts, he hasn’t been able to glean the data he needs. His task as Tim’s brain trust is to gently push him toward the instruments that offer the most scientific value. The trick is to do so without offending him in the process, as Josh Wurman had at ChaserCon.
Like Wurman before him, Gallus wants wind-speed data, not pressure. There’s a big question mark surrounding the distribution of wind speeds in the boundary layer, and that’s where the most promising research lies right now. The media probe is a better tool for gathering velocity estimates, especially as the wind turns vertical, since it’s possible to use the video to deduce the speed of debris. Even more reliable is a pair of media probes, which is what Gallus would like to see more often. As subtly as possible, he presses: “Maybe there’s some chance you could deploy the media probes first?”
For reasons both romantic and tactical in nature, Tim has insisted on prioritizing the deployment of HITPR. The original probe is his first love, and pressure is his longest-running data set. It brought him acclaim, financial backing, and the respect of scientists he admires. There’s a certain stubbornness and pride to his trust in the turtle. More practically, the turtle weighs only fifty pounds and can be deployed in moments. The media probe, on the other hand, weighs a backbreaking one hundred pounds. Tim is now fifty-one, doing most of the heavy lifting himself. At moments like this Tim must empathize with Howie Bluestein’s travails during the TOTO years, bogged down not only by the wiliness of tornadoes, but by the weight of his own instrument.
If there’s a third parcel of bad news to complete the trio, it’s that Josh Wurman might have been right after all. His words from back in Aurora—about the limitations of Tim’s turtles, and the precariousness of his funding—must start to echo now. Both warnings are suddenly, aggravatingly prescient.
Tim has spent the last few seasons with his nose to the grindstone.
