Sometimes the tornado wins big

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, tornadoes, atmospheric science, meteorology, storm chasers, biographies

I've never chased tornadoes, but I have seen a few. The number is small enough to catalog:

• 1964, August, Cedar Point, Ohio: A squall line spit out seven waterspouts, one after another, that marched out of Sandusky Bay and crossed the Causeway and Chaussee between the amusement park and the city of Sandusky, then dissipated. Waterspouts are seldom stronger than EF0 or EF1.
• 1985, Summer (July?), Rapid City, South Dakota: 4 tornadoes, all probably EF1, touched down in and around the city. I saw two of them. Looking west out my back door, I saw a funnel forming, ran out to take a picture of it, then found it hard to open the door against the wind. My wife called me to the other side of the house. To the northeast, a tornado was on the ground right across the street, tearing up sorghum in my neighbor's field. It was moving east, and no houses were hit. Driving into town the next day, I saw three buildings. Two were untouched; the third, in between the others, had lost its roof, a metal roof which was curled up behind the building. The barbed-wire fence in front of the buildings was full of fiberglass insulation.
• 1990, Summer (August?), Stillwater, Oklahoma: I didn't actually see this one, it was wrapped in rain. I was visiting a friend when my wife phoned to say the tornado siren near our home had gone off—would I please come home? I kidded her, "It sounds like I am safer where I am, but I'll come right now." All the stop lights were not functioning, and nobody else was on the road. As I turned onto the main drag that runs north through town, it began to rain so hard there was soon surf in the middle of the street. When it began to hail, I turned into a parking lot up against a large store, to its south. I tuned to a Tulsa station (the local station was off the air), just in time to hear them say, "We have it on radar, it is crossing Perkins at McElroy." I said to myself, "That is where I am!" The store was on the southeast corner of that intersection. The tornado was actually half a block to my north, taking the top floor from a row of two-story apartment buildings and piling up their A/C units in land to the east. It also broke off a dozen or more power poles around ten feet above ground level, so it was a "skimmer", not quite on the ground yet. I saw all this after the sky cleared, about two minutes after the radio announcement. I made it home safely.
• 1994, June, near Colby, Kansas: We were on our way to Denver from Stillwater. Our son was 7 at the time. Highway I-70 had just hooked northwest, several miles west of Grinnell. Perhaps 10-15 miles ahead we saw a squall line dropping a tornado, which traveled across the road and then dissipated. Another soon followed, and then a third. Then the storm itself broke up. I had slowed down, expecting we might have to stop before getting near the storm. We got to that bit of highway about 15 minutes after the last tornado collapsed and the sky had cleared. There was about a half mile of wet highway, with some torn-up ground on both sides. These were probably EF1 tornadoes. Though that is "weak" compared to the monster EF4 and EF5 storms, an EF1 can still roll a car around until there is too little room left inside for you to stay alive.

What is the tornado scale? The "F" or Fujita Scale was developed by Theodore Fujita in 1971. It was originally a 13-level scale of wind speeds, derived by the formula (V = wind speed in mph):

V = 14.1(F+2)^1.5

Dr. Fujita didn't expect F numbers greater than 5 to ever be used. So far, none has. This formula produces this table of the minimum wind speed for each F number:

• F0 = 40 mph
• F1 = 73 mph
• F2 = 113 mph
• F3 = 158 mph
• F4 = 207 mph
• F5 = 261 mph
• F6 = 319 mph

The "EF" or Enhanced Fujita scale replaced the "F" scale in 2007, with the threshold velocities changed to account for improved research into the kinds of damage caused by various wind speeds. The six thresholds (there is no EF6 or higher) are 65, 85, 110, 135, 165, 200. There is no corresponding formula, but a geometrical analysis indicates to me that a theoretical EF6 region should begin at about 235 or 240 mph and EF7 at about 285-290. This is important for what follows. But let it be said, an EF5 tornado can rip the slab of a house right out of the ground, and even pull some basements up, so there is little point in assigning larger numbers without measurement. When a tornado leaves nothing behind but plowed ground, you're already off the charts!

The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras, by Brantley Hargrove, is a very exciting, fascinating, and ultimately rather sad, biography of Tim Samaras. The author is an excellent journalist, who dug into his subject to the point that he participated in several storm chases with friends of Tim, and witnessed some awesome tornadoes in the process.

Tim Samaras exemplifies the self-educated genius. Classroom study was not for him. With his parents' encouragement, he began taking apart various appliances and electronic devices from an early age. Sometimes he could get them back together. By the time he needed paying work, he was such a valuable instrument inventor and repairman that he was hired in spite of having no college. He cut his professional teeth designing and running instrument packages that could, for example, measure the blast force of two tons of ANFO, the explosive that Timothy McVeigh used to destroy the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 (an explosion I felt from 75 miles away).

Tim was also a weather fanatic, and took to storm chasing very early on, teaching himself the meteorological knowledge he needed to forecast where a storm would produce a tornado—or a row of them—and how powerful they were likely to be. From 1999-2001 he developed the HITPR, the first instrument package to survive a direct hit by a tornado core and record the central pressure and temperature profile. He called it "the turtle"; its shape was designed to hug the ground better and better as the wind grew stronger. Its first success came in 2003 in Manchester, SD.

Other successes followed, in spite that the funding he was able to attract was rather poor compared to some other "professional" groups. He continued to get measurements nobody else could get, right up until the end. This was in part due to his superior forecasting abilities, knowing which way a storm was likely to turn, so he could deploy one or more turtles (or successors thereof) and get out of there alive. In one case, the tornado core hit his device 15 seconds after he had turned it on!

His son Paul became a leading photographer and videographer for his work. Thus it was, that when his on-the-spot forecast was not spot-on, May 31, 2013, near El Reno, OK, he, his son, and a close friend, meteorologist Carl Young, were killed by an EF5 tornado. Its official wind speed, measured by others with radar near the time of his death, was 295 mph. The highest wind speed measured for the El Reno tornado was about 305 mph, the second tornado in history to exceed 300 mph. Here is where my estimates above are meaningful: if there is any meaning to the extrapolation I made, this was really an EF7 tornado, and by the older scale, nearly an F6. At the time Tim was killed, its "core" was 2.3 miles wide. The core is defined as the area within which wind speeds exceed 110 mph, at least for tornadoes EF2 and stronger. To people on the ground and comparatively nearby, who survived, it looked like an upside-down mountain, stuck in the Earth. To anyone closer than about a mile away from its outer edge, it seemed to fill from horizon to horizon, and hang overhead like a rippling cliff.

The following image, clipped from a YouTube video by Dan Robinson, shows the tornado from several miles away. Its visible funnel is "only" about a mile wide at this point, but the smaller funnel to the right is a suction vortex that shows the actual width of the whole storm. This vortex, if I read the book right, was itself moving around and around the core at around 100 mph, and had its own winds in the 150+ mph range. Thus the outer edge of that vortex—or one like it—would be the source of the extreme winds that approached and probably exceeded 300 mph.

Largely due to the work of self-educated engineer Tim Samaras, meteorologists and physicists are puzzling out the workings of these storms that produce most violent winds on Earth. RIP Tim Samaras and Paul Samaras and Carl Young. I am sorry you are gone. May your legacy continue. And much thanks to Brantley Hargrove for bringing their story to us, particularly folks who may never see a tornado for themselves.

Spinning for science - and the rush

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, weather phenomena, tornadoes, storm chasers, memoirs

You don't have to be crazy to chase storms with Reed Timmer, but it sure helps. He exemplifies the X generation's emphasis on the X in eXtreme—just ask him—as he recounts in his new book Into the Storm: Violent Tornadoes, Killer Hurricanes, and Death-defying Adventures in Extreme Weather. Andrew Tilin is cited as co-author.

By my count, from 1998 onward, Timmer's storm chasing buddies have lost four autos, destroyed by hail or flood, and he has lost at least one and perhaps two of his own. His truck-based armored vehicle "Dominator" is probably next on the list, because he plans to drive it right into a tornado vortex. I haven't yet heard whether he's done so.

Reed Timmer appears in the Storm Chasers show on Discovery Channel. The ups and downs of his life that led to this gig are the subject of the book, which begins with his arrival in Norman, Oklahoma in 1998, where he studied Meteorology. He obtained Bachelors' and Masters' degrees there, and has begun PhD Studies, but is apparently still at work on that.

The book is his memoir of involvement with tornadoes, and a couple hurricanes, and of his career as a publicity hound, once he found that his videos were a salable commodity. His web site TornadoVideos sells plenty of videos. He is not much into still pictures, so I got this image from one of his rivals, who kindly supplies her copyright notice in the image; see Green Sky Chaser.

For geographic reasons, the United States great plains are Tornado Central, the location of Tornado Alley, where more than half of all the world's tornadoes occur (some sources claim 80%, but I think that is high). During the years I lived in Stillwater, Oklahoma, while I didn't see a tornado, I almost drove into one that was wrapped in rain. I believe that was in 1990, when one tore through the middle of town and caused a bit of havoc. The road leading north from Stillwater to Ponca City crosses the buckle of the tornado belt.

Four years later, on a family vacation, we saw one that looked a lot like this image, as we approached Goodland, Kansas from the southeast. It crossed the road about ten miles ahead of us, and the storm dissipated by the time we got there. I like to see a tornado over there, just close enough to see well, but that's it. Storm chasers like a more up-close-and-personal experience.

This "up close" element sets Timmer apart. He's managed to get himself inside a couple of F0 twisters (In yesterday's post I wrote that an F0 has wind speeds less than 73 mph or 117 kph or 33 m/s. That is almost enough to knock you off your feet, but not enough to pick you up. Anything stronger, you're not likely to survive). He thrives on getting close enough so the storm fills his video camera's viewfinder. As a result, he's obtained many dramatic videos.

The "up close" element makes more conservative storm chasers uneasy, even angry. Timmer is a maverick, and revels in it. While he frequently writes of his desire to improve the science, it is the adrenaline rush that drives him. Let's be clear, he is a scientist all right. He's simply one of the more colorful ones. I'd compare him with Robert Bakker, the paleontologist who did the most to popularize the more active, intelligent side of dinosaurs. If Timmer's swashbuckling style gets more people's attention, and particularly helps the denizens of Tornado Alley save their own lives, I'm all for it. I don't have cable TV, or I'd mark my calendar to watch the next episode of Storm Chasers.

Tornadoes and Their Groupies

kw: book reviews, tornadoes, storm chasers, weather phenomena, global warming

Mark Svenvold, Fordham University's Poet-in-Residence, spent a summer traveling with veteran storm chaser Matt Biddle, logging 6,000 miles in May, 2004. His book Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America (Henry Holt, publisher)s not so much a chronicle as a memoir and meditation. The book has copious endnotes and a good index, but no bibliography.

The first half of May that year was quiet, quiet enough to drive hundreds of storm-chasers half crazy. The second half was anything but. May 22 produced the Hallam, NE tornado, which basically plowed a furrow some sixty miles wide, and as wide as 2.5 miles, the widest on record.

Mark and Matt didn't see that one. The account in the book is from several eyewitnesses (and some scar-witnesses). But they saw plenty of others.

With the phenomenon of storm-chasing, quite a number of allied subjects fall under scrutiny: the classes of chasers (from yahoos to scientists), the advent and rise of the Weather Channel, and possible influences of global warming among them. Actually, it seems in retrospect that a third of the writing is polemical, intended to convince the reader of the reality, not just of global warming, but of human causes thereof.

Plenty of ink, and several photos, goes to Sean Casey and his "Tornado Intercept Vehicle" (TIV), a homemade tank weighing over six tons. Mr. Casey doesn't fit any other category, but is serious enough, and has learned enough, to earn the respect of the operators of the Doppler-on-Wheels (DOW) trucks from the Center for Severe Weather Research.

He was preaching to choir in my case. But I'm one who sees more benefit than loss in that equation. I know the math better than most. We know CO2 has about doubled since 1850. We can figure it has resulted in about a degree or two (F; or half to 1 deg C) of warming. Most of this has been polar. In temperate latitudes, the main effect has been greater variability: longer, warmer spring and summer, colder but shorter winter, with more violent storms more common than before. If the amount of CO2 were increased ten times, the maximum warming would be 4-6 deg F (2-3 C), so there's a limit to what will result just by our burning stuff.

There's just enough photography to whet the appetite. To see more, there are plenty of web sites with thousands of pictures. The cultish reaction many chasers have to images and video of tornadoes prompts the author to call it "torn porn." Probably apt. We tend to be drawn to destruction, and nothing causes greater levels of localized destruction than a tornado. A really big one, an F5, leaves only plowed ground. There's plenty to like about Big Weather.