Riders on the Storm

Who needs Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton? Texas has the real tornado chasers—weather buffs who combine meteorological savvy and intuition in their quest for adventure.

by Joe Nick Patoski

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“It’s prime West Texas tornado country,” Moller whooped as we recrossed the state line. “The edge of that anvil is already straight-edged and hard. That sonofabitch is gonna be a supercell!” Four miles later, he suddenly veered off the road to a spot near a tractor tilling the bare red dirt. Five vehicles followed. Five more cars and trucks parked about a quarter mile farther up the highway. The chasers began unpacking cameras and setting up tripods. The storm cloud was a few miles away, and it was producing lightning, thunder, and downpours. Doswell observed a cut in the base, a sign of downdraft that often leads to mesocyclone rotation, but Moller noticed a stratoform, or scud cloud, pushing out from under the base. “That means there is outflow, which is not good for tornadoes,” Moller told me. From where we stood, humid wind continued blowing toward the storm, which sucked the energy up. The storm was strengthening. “This is just gorgeous,” Doswell said, awed by the spectacle. But the base continued expanding, then contracting. “I’m thinking we ought to go south,” Doswell said, but no sooner had we gotten into the car than Sam Barricklow, who was watching the storm from his van nearby, came on the radio. “This storm is starting to intensify and there is slight rotation.”

Martin Lisius broke in on the radio. He was north of us and was observing the same storm. He reported that a wall had dropped from the base. Moller pushed the speed limit on the two-lane blacktop, trying to catch up with the storm. Moller saw a banded collar above the base, like a barber’s pole, as the wall cloud began rotating, meaning a mesocyclone had formed. The storm was a supercell. “Chuck,” he said, his voice rising, “call the National Weather Service. They may have to upgrade this from a watch to a warning from what we can see.”

A funnel tail briefly dropped from the low cloud that was rotating violently now. Moller stopped the car. Then the tail retreated, and we resumed toward Bovina, speeding past fields just drenched by a downpour and past toppled farm machinery, indicating wind damage. The radio reported that a tornado warning had been issued. Our car now led a trail of headlights up the road in a storm-induced darkness. Moller madly steered the car through a thick fog rising from just-fallen hail, using his two-way radio to warn others behind us of the road hazard. East and north of Bovina, the wall cloud finally gave the chasers what they wanted, as an imperfect tornado dropped from the mesocyclone’s menacing tentacles onto the ground. But no sooner had it touched down than it began to dissipate. “It’s getting eaten up by the rear flank downdraft,” Doswell said.

Outside Friona, we whipped past two vehicles with flashing lights parked on the shoulder—storm spotters monitoring the situation. Danger was clear and imminent. Violent gusts shook the car and knocked off the radio antenna. In Friona the scene was unnerving, as people dashed from their homes to storm cellars. Emergency vehicles were stationed at the town’s main intersection. We pulled over at the north edge of town, and Moller and Doswell scrambled for their cameras. Another funnel was dropping from the rotating wall cloud.

“Yes!” Doswell cried as the tornado warning siren in Friona began to wail. “It’s well developed . . .” And then a minute later, “Damn! It broke up.”

“Let’s go get it,” Moller yelled, jumping back into the car. “It’s gonna do it again.”

Sam broke in on the radio. “I see some teeth around the old meso. It may be intensifying.” With Moller and Doswell in the lead, the caravan of chasers followed the storm north, then west. Suddenly Moller hit the brakes. “There’s a tornado on the ground to the left,” he shouted. The cameras focused on the funnel, which was indeed a tornado, though it was practically transparent. Except for the sweet song of a bird on a phone wire, there was an eerie silence. Then Moller yelled again: “We need to back up. It’s coming right at us.” The translucent cone was only a few hundred yards away and headed in our direction. Moller shifted into reverse, stopping at a safe distance where other chaser vehicles were pulling up.

After about a minute, the funnel fell apart. Up the road, wisps of a low black cloud circulated on the ground near a farmhouse. “That was your quintessential low-level mesocyclone,” Doswell said, getting back into the car as other vehicles were still arriving.

“Let’s try to think ahead of everyone else,” Moller said, speaking into the radio. “Sam, you made a great call on this storm early on, when I thought it was a dead duck.” We raced north into Deaf Smith County, passing a truck with flashing lights and a huge radar on the trailer. The National Severe Storms Lab’s portable Doppler radar was taking the pulse of the supercell.

A new mesocyclone was developing out of the cloud base. Trying to get ahead of the storm, we drove into Hereford, then zigzagged north and west about 25 miles to intercept the storm. It was two miles ahead of us, but we could clearly make out the funnel’s silver-gray elephant’s trunk dancing across the range, flashing its power for several minutes before retreating skyward. Watching it filled me with awe and, bizarrely, a desire to get closer. Though nowhere near an F5, which is the most dangerous twister, it was a lethal beauty.

We continued our chase for another forty miles until Moller and Doswell reluctantly agreed it was time to give up and start heading south in search of another storm. “Well, we started out this year getting a tornado,” Doswell said. “Now we’ve got to get a photogenic tornado.”

“This is where the reality is far better than the fantasy,” Moller said.

“You were pretty lucky,” Doswell told me, “seeing all that on your first day with us.” 

At dusk we watched one last storm near Littlefield, vainly trying to make out the silhouette of a rotating meso. Then we headed to the twinkling lights of Lubbock for the night. At the entrance of the Hub City Brewery, Moller and Doswell ran into several other chasers, including Betsy Abrams and Matt Crowther, husband-and-wife meteorologists on holiday from the Weather Channel in Atlanta. They too had started the day in Amarillo, but they had headed down south and west of Lubbock instead of to Clovis. The inevitable question was quickly asked: “See anything?” Abrams reported that they had spotted a gustnado, which they videotaped, and had run into baseball-size hail. That was it.

In the middle of the late-night meal, a wild thunderstorm passed over the city. Moller couldn’t restrain himself from going out to watch the action. As if on cue, a lightning bolt hit a pole across the street, briefly turning it a glowing red. A waitress squealed with fright. “Sorry,” Moller said. “We probably brought that with us.”

LUBBOCK WAS THE PERFECT PLACE for me to end the chase, because with the storm comes storm debris, the subject of study at the Institute for Disaster Research and the Wind Engineering Research Center on the campus of Texas Tech University. The research centers were created after the 1970 Lubbock Tornado caused 26 deaths and $135 million in damage and wrecked the city’s tallest building. “We realized that Mother Nature had given us a $135 million laboratory in our own back yard,” said James McDonald, the director of the Institute for Disaster Research.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, and later from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was trying to establish baselines for tornado-proof nuclear reactors, the institute has studied wind, tornado, hail, wind shear, and other severe-weather-related events throughout the region, as well as hurricanes on the Gulf Coast. Texas Tech also has a field lab that features a metal building, loaded with sensors, that circles on a railroad track to test wind pressure and wind stress. There is an indoor wind lab with air compressor cannons that fire fifteen-pound two-by-fours, metal pipes, and chunks of hail at speeds of about 100 miles per hour at various wall materials.

Documenting damage from sixty storm events, the centers’ studies have yielded some interesting results. Most wind damage is done by weak tornadoes, with winds from 125 to 150 miles per hour. Opening a window in advance of a tornado is no longer recommended because wind damage is caused by the Bernoulli effect, the tendency of wind to speed up as it moves around and over objects. Using reinforced masonry in buildings is essential to avoiding disasters like the 1987 Saragosa Tornado. “It wasn’t wind that killed people. It was the falling concrete blocks,” said Kishor Mehta, who oversees the wind lab. Since a tornado-proof home is economically unfeasible, Texas Tech researchers came up with the in-home storm shelter, essentially reinforcing the walls and ceiling on an inside room, for less than $2,500. “The mobile home is still very susceptible to tornado damage,” McDonald said. “Every mobile-home community should have enough shelters so that no one has to go more than a hundred and fifty feet to be safe.”

Even disaster specialists must sometimes answer the call to chase, as Richard Peterson, a meteorologist who works with Mehta and McDonald, did when a farmer near Matador called Peterson after hail the size of grapefruit fell on his land the night before. “He says he’s got a three- by five-inch specimen in his freezer, but I’ve got to come get it today or he is going to let it melt.”

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