More immediately, Tim needs a new source of operational cash. With Wurman’s VORTEX2 experiment about to kick off in May, TWISTEX can’t very well prove itself if it can’t afford to chase.
Ironically, it’s Wurman himself who opens the door for Tim’s next opportunity, perhaps inadvertently. In December 2008, the Discovery Channel reaches out to Tim and invites him to join the cast of Storm Chasers, a prime-time meteorological melodrama that tails researchers and severe-weather junkies on the cross-country hunt. With no other untapped benefactors, it’s an offer that Tim can’t possibly pass up.
His soon-to-be costars, Reed Timmer and Sean Casey, pilot custom-armored vehicles into proximity for the ultimate shot. They shout, jockey, engage in internecine squabbles, and make for divertingly watchable reality television. Considerably less theatrical is the team led by the show’s only scientist, Dr. Josh Wurman. He deploys mobile radar trucks and pod probes in pursuit of data, a cool, collected quest not so readily suited to its fleeting slice of a forty-minute show. “The joke about our team was that we’re sort of serial killers,” Wurman says. “Our pulses don’t go up when the tornado happens. The Discovery people were thoroughly horrified.”
So horrified, in fact, that the producers need another research group to join the cast and leaven Wurman’s undramatic sobriety. To keep TWISTEX afloat, Tim agrees to sign over to Discovery the exclusive right to film his exploits for the show’s third season. With Discovery’s money, he can now afford to field his team for the entire season. There will even be enough left over to fill out the roster. He brings mesonet driver Ed Grubb on full-time. The fifty-five-year-old pensioner from Thornton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, possesses a well-combed and enviable head of salt-and-pepper hair, and a spiny mustache above a perpetually mischievous grin. At heart, Grubb is still the young goofball who played wide receiver for the Colorado School of Mines. He studied petroleum engineering there, but his career didn’t survive the oil-price collapse of the 1980s. After that, he switched gears and hired on with the Adams County School District in Commerce City, Colorado, as head of maintenance and construction. In his retirement, he chases storms and has probably seen more tornadoes than just about anyone else on the team. Like Tim, he may not have earned a degree in meteorology, but he knows how to keep a weather eye on the dangers ahead. “He’s a good guy to have out there,” Bruce Lee says, praising his situational awareness.
Under the watchful eye of the Discovery Channel, the 2009 season gets under way. The early months offer few useful intercepts, but things pick up in June. On the nineteenth, Tim at last lands the double media-probe deployment Gallus has long begged for, just outside Aurora, Nebraska. But to his profound disappointment, the footage is useless. While the single media probe’s 2004 penetration of the F3 in Storm Lake, Iowa, occurred in broad daylight, the Aurora tornado recording takes place at dusk. The light is too weak to accurately track debris. As it stands, they are no closer to getting a pure wind-speed measurement out of the media probes. The one point of light is Lee and Finley’s mesonet work. They collect a data set from across the hook echo of the Aurora tornado over nearly its entire life cycle, a rare thing in the history of atmospheric field science.
But in the meantime, VORTEX2 lands its first big data set of the year on a moderate EF2 tornado in Goshen County, Wyoming. The team surrounds the storm with mobile radars, mesonets, weather balloons, and various in situ instruments. None of the pods lands a direct hit, but the sheer number of observing platforms makes this the most thoroughly examined twister in history.
The 2009 season closes without any further successes, either for TWISTEX or VORTEX2. In a calm year, the first in which both teams have been active, the score ends 1–0, VORTEX2 the winner. With just one resounding success, Wurman no doubt would have preferred more. But it’s a good start for the program in a modest season, and 2010 promises a second chance. Tim, meanwhile, still has serious problems to solve.
In the interlude between seasons, Tim begins to bend his engineer’s mind to the task of envisioning a new direction for his probe program. He is a man pulled in many directions, by family, by a demanding full-time job at Applied Research Associates, and by TWISTEX. After his day job, after dinner with his family, Tim descends into the basement of his Lakewood home—Kathy calls it his “sanctuary”—and begins to conceptualize and construct a brand-new probe. Rare are the moments when his children find him relaxing on the couch.
By early May and the start of the 2010 tornado season, Tim emerges from the basement, confident he has remedied most of the design flaws and limitations of both the media probe and the turtle. He has done so by making something entirely new: a next-generation probe that combines both his signature devices—and then some—into one package. Tim dubs the instrument TOWER. Like HITPR, TOWER’s base is squat and safety-cone orange, but pyramidal rather than conical. There, the similarities end. The remainder of its instrumentation is mounted on a metal mast rising to the height of the average NBA point guard. Rather than sampling wind speed just a few inches above the surface, TOWER’s sonic and conventional anemometers obtain measurements at three different elevations, up to six and a half feet off the
