To Study Tornados, Bring an Apocalypse-Proof Truck. And Rocket Launchers Leave a comment

Reed Timmer has been chasing storms for greater than 20 years, since he intercepted his first twister in northern Oklahoma as an undergrad majoring in meteorology. Throughout that point, Timmer, who sometimes logs greater than 50,000 miles on the street annually, has intercepted numerous tornadoes, each serving to to additional his extreme-weather data. “We nonetheless don’t fully know what occurs inside a twister,” says Edgar ONeal, a climate journalist who’s Timmer’s chase associate.

Enter the Dominator. That is the third iteration of Timmer’s custom-built twister cellular, which he initially rolled out within the late 2000s. The present Dominator has the chassis of an F350 and weighs 10,000 kilos, enabling it to resist the particles, gorilla hail, and 150-mph winds that accompany essentially the most highly effective of storms. Based on Timmer, his “holy grail” is to drive the Dominator to inside a quarter-mile of a tornado, then shoot a rocket loaded with sensors straight into the guts of the twister. Timmer has achieved this as soon as: In Could 2019, the rocket tracked the vortex’s stress drop and frigid air temperature. His group’s hope within the coming yr is to launch dozens of rockets on the identical time into the swirling updraft of a tornado’s “influx notch.” However even when all these rockets fail, the Dominator is stuffed with its personal sensors to seize invaluable scientific information. “That’s the entire level,” says ONeal. “You may launch probes right into a twister, otherwise you will be the probe, and that’s the Dominator.”