Carl calls after them, “See you in June.”
Later in the evening, Lyons and Tim coordinate tomorrow’s LIV deployment over the phone. Unfortunately, the best vantage point from which to observe transient luminous events will be somewhere to the north, far from the supercell action. If Tim chases tornadoes in central Oklahoma in the day, he’ll be cutting it close. “If you go somewhere around Woodward,” Lyons says, “get set up by sunset. This will be an early event. As soon as it’s dark, I want you to be rolling.”
The next morning, Tim steers south out of Kansas toward Oklahoma. Lyons speaks with him again at around 11:00 a.m., and by all indications he is bound for the planned destination. But along the way the three stop off in Alva, some sixty-five miles northeast of Woodward, and park the LIV in a lot near the Woods County Courthouse.
Eleven days after the horror in Moore, it has become evident that the Oklahoma City area is in for another hard day. Tim and Carl are astute forecasters. Apart from the environmental indicators that practically scream EF5 to even the newbie chaser, they would have noticed the oppressive air, sopping with moisture and heavy with heat. It feels like a historic storm day. The pent-up energy is tangible, visible.
Tim and Carl, storm junkies that they are, can’t resist. They don’t want to sit on the sidelines as they did at Moore. They decide to leave the LIV in the courthouse parking lot and drive south to intercept the storm. “Lightning by night, and tornadoes by day, was the way he had it set up,” Lyons says. “I’m sure his intent was to be back in Woodward by the time it was dark.”
He wouldn’t leave the LIV some 130 miles to the north just to chase any old storm. Something epic is coming to the oil and cattle country west of Oklahoma City. The turtles are stowed in the trunk for just such an occasion, and Tim won’t miss the big show.
CHAPTER TWENTY
A SHIFT IN THE WIND
AT AROUND FOUR that afternoon, the mesonet stations in the counties west of Oklahoma City begin to register the change Rick Smith has been dreading all day. The omen isn’t anything as dramatic as a bloodred sunrise or a morning darkened by coagulating clouds. So subtle is the shift that those residing in Canadian and Caddo Counties are unlikely to notice it at all.
What troubles Smith, the warning-coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Center in Norman, is that the wind out of the south-southwest has deviated thirty degrees: and it’s now coursing in from the southeast. This means that the dry line has advanced toward the metro area. Air masses from different directions are now converging.
Smith had hoped beyond reason that at least one of the pieces would fail to fall into place today. But the winds are “backing” now, summoning up the low-level convergence required for tornadoes. Events have been set in motion.
Here we go, he says to himself.
Smith had sensed the storm potential as soon as he stepped outside this morning. A miasmal haze dimmed the sky. The air felt syrupy. A native Tennessean and twenty-year veteran of the weather service, Smith made sure the tornado shelter in his garage was unlocked. He cleared the spiderwebs out and checked the batteries on the flashlights and weather radio. He gave his family a strict curfew: be home no later than 4:00 p.m.
By 9:00 a.m., he arrived at the National Weather Center, located at the southern edge of the University of Oklahoma. He made his way to the forecast office on the second floor, passing a cluster of desks arranged in a horseshoe pattern, and wall-to-wall windows with a view to the western sky. Each desk was crowded with as many as three monitors, displaying feeds from visible satellite and radar; the projections of short- and long-range computer models; and the office’s various social media accounts, from which advisories are disseminated to the public. At the front of the room, a bank of flatscreen televisions was tuned to the local news.
Smith’s first task was to convene the “morning huddle,” briefing an already wrung-out crew on the day’s dreadful possibility. They had all been pulling long shifts, issuing forecasts and warnings they hoped the people of Oklahoma would heed. They had watched in real time on May 20 as the radar signature over Moore killed neighbors in primary shades of red, green, and blue. The tornado passed within four miles of Smith’s home and his family.
Among the forecasters on duty was Marc Austin, the chaser who’d celebrated the Rozel tornado at the Comfort Suites with Carl and Paul no more than two weeks ago. That glimmer of chase nirvana was already fully eclipsed, though. Yesterday, Austin had worked a nerve-racking twelve-hour shift on a severe-weather threat that had fizzled at the last moment. He was exhausted.
The winds hadn’t backed yesterday. But by the morning of May 31, few of the forecasters believed the luck would hold.
In the huddle, Austin described the instability as “maxed out.” Once storms began to ignite along the dry line, they would go tornadic in a hurry, provided there was wind shear at lower levels. Without shear near the ground—without those backing winds—no vortex would be possible.
Tornadoes don’t thrive on unidirectional harmony. They feed on convergence, on collision and opposition. This requires a spiral staircase of diverging wind vectors—a pathway for vorticity. It starts with a southeasterly wind near the surface, shifting southwesterly the higher it goes, and finally westerly once it hits the jet stream several miles up. As of this morning, one puzzle piece was missing. But Smith and Austin knew the winds would likely back to the southeast as the day wore on.
If
