But as Tim’s team stands down, Dr. Josh Wurman will take to the road on another expedition. VORTEX2 may have stumbled in its final year, but Wurman has landed the necessary grants to extend its mission into a new project, dubbed ROTATE 2012. To add salt to the wound, ROTATE’s core mission is to illuminate the near-surface environment in which Tim has specialized for years. The pièce de résistance of the effort is Wurman’s fleet of pods, now numbering twenty-two in situ probes, each equipped to take video while also logging pressure and wind speed. While Tim has been forging his new Lamborghini in TOWER, Wurman has built his pack of Chevrolets—which he’ll be deploying this year while Tim sits on the sidelines.
Tim chose the gravel road during his meeting with Wurman at ChaserCon all those years ago. He’s scraped by and strung along, making magic out of nothing. But now all of Wurman’s warnings have held true. The longer Tim pushes forward, the clearer the destination becomes. After all this time, his route is looking like a dead end.
There’s no time to wallow, though. Tim must attend to the present. Out of work and now semiretired, he approaches a company in Tupelo, Mississippi, that had built a small mobile radar for Reed Timmer during Storm Chasers. Hyperion Technology CEO Geoff Carter is already a big fan of Tim’s. An employee who’d been in the field during Discovery filming had returned to Tupelo gushing about Tim: “We gotta hire him; he’s a genius.” Carter offered him a job at the time, but Tim had too many obligations then.
The offer, Carter tells him now, is still on the table. But before Tim accepts, he has a couple of unorthodox conditions: First, he won’t relocate to Tupelo and uproot his family. Second, he wants a guaranteed leave of absence in the early spring and summer to field TWISTEX. Whether the team takes to the plains again may be an ambiguous prospect, but Tim isn’t prepared to let it go. Storm season is sacrosanct and always will be.
Carter doesn’t hesitate to agree to the terms.
Hyperion’s ongoing research may have nothing to do with tornadoes, but one project at least falls within Tim’s sweet spot at the intersection of tech and severe weather. The company is developing an instrument package for NOAA that will measure hurricane wind speed and alert coastal communities to storm surge. Carter’s engineers have been racking their brains to come up with a sensor that is not only capable of reliably detecting the rising waters, but tough enough to take a sustained pounding. Tim’s off-the-cuff idea is practically antediluvian in its simplicity. Place a tube in the water and cap off the top with a pressure transducer. If the water rises, so will the pressure. The ease with which he has solved the device’s technical challenge is stunning. Carter even lets Tim deploy the package, dubbed eyeSPY, on the Mississippi coast, near Waveland. Hurricane Isaac is already darkening the Atlantic sky just off to the east.
Next up for Hyperion, Tim takes on the construction of a new chase vehicle, one unlike any the world has ever seen. In 2010, he’d been contacted by an atmospheric scientist named Walter Lyons, who made an offer an intensely curious man such as Tim couldn’t possibly refuse. “DARPA said, ‘Send us your ideas; we want high-speed photography of lightning and sprites,’ ” recalls Lyons. “I needed a partner. Tim was the logical person.” During a 2006 side project for NatGeo, Tim had single-handedly documented aspects of lightning behavior that physicists had only theorized about, using the same high-speed cameras he’d trained on explosive shock waves for decades. When Lyons reached out in 2010, the pair spent the off-season shooting lightning, but found that the risk of stepping outside a vehicle amid deadly strikes was too dangerous. To succeed, they concluded, they’d need to find a way to stay inside. Now, Lyons and Tim have a chance to make good on that idea—with a recent influx of funding for lightning research and a blueprint for a customized lightning-chase vehicle.
Like the sprawling VORTEX2, the project that Lyons wants Tim to join is a moon-shot effort underwritten by the federal government to unravel the fundamental mysteries of lightning. The project isn’t interested solely in the familiar bolt, but in observing a menagerie of dimly understood electromagnetic phenomena called transient luminous events, or TLEs. During some thunderstorms, electrical discharges splash luminous plasma across the upper atmosphere like paint in one of Jackson Pollock’s expressionist works. They can span dozens of miles but last for only a fraction of a second. Researchers want to know why only some lightning produces TLEs. Of equal interest are the recurrent upward strokes emanating from wind turbines, and the expensive repairs they often necessitate.
The effort, dubbed the Physical Origins of Coupling to the Upper Atmosphere from Lightning, or PhOCAL, will involve a massive Lightning Mapping Array. This network of antennas, electric-field sensors, and continuously recording video cameras are spread across sections of central Kansas and west-central Oklahoma, usually near wind farms. SpriteNet cameras have been installed in locations throughout the plains, including one on Tim’s bedroom balcony.
Tim’s contribution to the effort is what he dubs the Lightning Intercept Vehicle, or LIV. He’ll spend much of 2012 and 2013 building it with Lyons and Hyperion.
