Its final and most theatrical component is inspired by a previous chase in the Texas Panhandle, where Tim watched lightning set an oil well ablaze. Tarry gouts of smoke had become entrained in the storm’s updraft, spiraling skyward. Hoping for a similar effect, Tim has affixed a battery of orange smoke canisters to the center of TOWER’s stem.
Without a doubt, this is the most advanced in situ probe ever constructed—as far away as an instrument can get from a fleet of Chevy probes.
But with all its improvements, the package tips the scales at an immovable four hundred pounds. One of the media probe’s chief liabilities—its weight—has now multiplied. No one will be hoisting this instrument and jogging down the road with it. Tim will have to deploy directly from the back of the truck.
This means that his faithful black GMC has outlived its usefulness. Tim’s new probe vehicle—outfitted by a company in Englewood, Colorado, not far from his home—is the ultimate storm-chasing rig: a white, one-ton GMC diesel, sealed from bumper to bumper with an impact-resistant elastomeric Line-X coating. A brush guard shields the front end, to which eight high-intensity driving lights are mounted. To fend off sharp debris, the off-road tires boast an internal stiffening made of Kevlar.
After the Quinter debacle, Tim also incorporates a winch with 8,000 pounds of pulling power, along with a few new deluxe touches. To the hood, as a side project for Boeing, he has installed carbon-composite tiles and piezometer blocks, for measuring the force of hail impacts. Any time these sensors and tiles take a hit, they will trigger a Vision Research Phantom V12 high-speed camera mounted to the dash. This instrument, which costs about as much as a new car, can take high-def footage at a blistering 6,800 frames per second.
Last, and most essential, is the 1,500-pound-capacity hydraulic lift gate at the rear. This he will use to lower TOWER to the ground—as quickly as possible. Winnowing down deployment time is imperative. “What I’m hoping for is around twenty to thirty seconds, which is quite a task given its weight,” Tim says. “If we can do that, we can collect more information than any instrument that has ever been placed in the path of a tornado.”
Like a NASCAR pit crew, Tim and Carl drill, deploying TOWER repeatedly. They unfasten the black straps crisscrossing the base, shove TOWER onto the lift gate, lower it, and pull the instrument off the platform with a pair of steel handles.
Yet no matter how many times they practice, the unloading always takes longer than Tim would prefer. TOWER is as unwieldy as TOTO. Certainly, it will allow for no time to deploy a second device, much less a fleet of them. To make matters worse, TOWER isn’t technically ready as storm season rolls around; Tim hasn’t had time to install a dynamic pressure-reduction port. But the season is upon them, whether Tim and TWISTEX are ready or not.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BOWDLE, SOUTH DAKOTA
ON MAY 10, 2010, TWISTEX misses the year’s first major tornado outbreak, losing out on two EF4s in the Oklahoma City area. Four days later, they’re in deep West Texas, pursuing a supercell near a town aptly named Notrees. But the road grid in this part of the state couldn’t be more ill suited to storm chasing. TOWER never gets anywhere near its target.
To miss a trio of strong tornadoes with the first new probe Tim has developed in seven years is grating. As much as he knows by now that patience—for weeks, for months, for years—is the key to finding the right intercept, that doesn’t make the close calls any easier to bear. Tim’s lugging around either the future of tornado research or a four-hundred-pound scrap heap in the back of his truck—and he can’t know which until it enters the crucible of a plains titan.
By May 21, 2010, Bruce Lee and Kathy Finley have to return to their home state, for what should be a short breather. They stop off in Minneapolis to visit Finley’s sister and complete repairs on a mesonet station that a student had accidentally smashed against a motel awning. In the early-morning hours of the twenty-second, they examine the latest weather model runs, as they have every day so far this season. To their shock, the outlook for the day’s storm potential has improved tremendously overnight. The models predict a highly unstable atmosphere over South Dakota. Along with preconditions such as wind shear, they look for the presence of moisture, heat, and the tendency for air to rise, which is accounted for by a metric known as convective available potential energy, or CAPE. With CAPE at 1,000 joules per kilogram, storms are likely. At 2,500 joules, storm chasers start to perk up. For May 22, the models project 4,800 joules per kilogram. This should bring chasers streaming from all directions. It is the kind of number heralding days of legend, the likes of Jarrell, Texas, 1997, or Bridge Creek, Oklahoma, 1999.
Lee and Finley jump on the phone at 6:00 a.m. The rest of the team is currently snoozing in a motel in Chadron, Nebraska, more than 600 miles to their southwest. They manage to raise their former student Matt Grzych, and tell him to boot up his laptop to look at the night’s model runs, especially the Rapid Update Cycle, or RUC. Grzych pores over the data and agrees: this is the setup TWISTEX has been waiting for. Before long, Carl, too, is enthusing over the RUC model. That each forecaster on the team is zeroing in on the same South Dakota target is telling.
Grzych and Carl start rousting the sleeping crew. Lee and Finley hurriedly finish the repairs on the mesonet and drive some six hours west onto the South Dakota plains, arriving after lunch with plenty of
