When he’s working, storm chaser Tim Samaras is always headed in the wrong direction.
This week has been no exception.
As terrified residents headed for safety in Oklahoma, Samaras and his team of tornado chasers were speeding toward Shawnee, hoping to get there before the twister hit.
“The last four days have been really crazy,” the 55-year-old scientist, whose work is partly funded by the National Geographic Society, told the Daily News Wednesday.
He and his crew didn’t beat the tornado that struck in Shawnee on Sunday, killing two elderly men.
“We were right on its tail,” he said.
They gave a wide berth to the massive twister that decimated Moore, Okla., on Monday, killing nine children and 13 others, deciding it was just too dangerous to chase that monster, which measured a catastrophic EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale — the highest tornado measurement.
Instead, they headed south to Texas, where serious storm warnings were in effect Tuesday and Wednesday.
But two days of racing around the Lone Star state ended with not a twister in sight.
“That just goes to show how much we don’t know about tornadoes,” Samaras said as he drove home to Colorado.
“Tornados are very, very fleeting. They’re difficult to predict, they’re difficult to measure,” said Samaras, who’s been chasing funnel clouds for 35 years and has invented several tools and instruments for measuring tornadoes.
His team carries up to 10 probes, which monitor weather conditions in and around tornadoes, cameras, laptops and GPS navigation, all for use in measuring and tracking storms.
They also carry ham-radio equipment, first aid, winches and saws to help victims and move debris.
Their scientific goal is collecting data that improves the understanding of cyclones — and better understanding means better warning times.
“Right now, the typical warning time is about 17 minutes, Samaras said. “Wouldn’t it be great if that lead time could be 30 minutes? It would be really cool to increase that amount of time.”
The residents of ruined Moore heard tornado sirens 16 minutes before their city was gone. At devastated elementary schools, students and teachers were running to inside hallways when the walls around them were ripped away.
“We have to learn the environmental conditions that may or may not predict whether a storm will become a tornado,” he said.
“Right now we really don’t understand what kind of thunder storm will become a tornado.
“There were three storms that hit Oklahoma. Moore was the most powerful … and we don’t really know why the Moore tornado was so strong,” he said.
One possibility, he said, was a sudden wind shift that drastically amped the storm’s power.
He and his team spend every May and June riding Tornado Alley, a dangerous trough stretching from Texas to as far north as Canada. It has the highest frequency of tornadoes in the world, Samaras said,
The reason is a mixture of environmental conditions that often coalesce into perfect tornado weather: moisture from the Gulf of Mexico mixes with hot dry air from the desert areas of New Mexico and Arizona and enters a very active jet stream that covers the heartland, Samaras said.
So why do people continue to populate the alley? “It’s some of the richest soil on the planet when it comes to farming,” Samaras said. “That’s why they call it the heartland. People learn to live with it.”
Just as they learn to live without being able to predict tornadoes with any certainty.
“Myself and my team are trying to improve that,” Samaras said.
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