big weather chasing tornadoes in the heart of america

#Big weather chasing tornadoes in the heart of america professional

On Monday, he saw something on a radar image on his home computer. He has chased storms for two decades, intercepting more than two hundred tornadoes.

#Big weather chasing tornadoes in the heart of america professional

As it happens, his professional ability to read the discrete particulars of geological strata-large-scale, complex, three-dimensional puzzles-translates well to the ever-shifting wind patterns of the robust supercell thunderstorms that can produce tornadoes.

Herndon is a petroleum geologist who hunts for small oil-and-shale gas deposits in rock formations, taking a percentage of every successful well, called “mailbox money.” He has an affinity for calculated risk. While Wurman and the others were sitting in a target area fifty or so miles south of Oklahoma City, Mark Herndon was working at home on a geological survey. MOPE might work: Minimal Optimism, Pessimistically Engaged. In a field loaded with inscrutable acronyms-C.I.N., L.L.J., M.C.S., E.C.M.W.F.-one might cast about for an acronym to describe this watchful, hopeful, but wary emotional condition. It happens so frequently that chase talk tends to waver back and forth between a single pair of pessimistic poles. If they’re out of position, it’s over-they’re skunked. The average tornado lasts for just a few minutes. It’s difficult to decode which is which, and they are often twenty or more miles apart. One will send tornadoes corkscrewing into farm fields, the other will grumble and pelt them with hail. No matter how much data and experience chasers have, they eventually find themselves confronted with a quandary: a choice between two storms that look identical. The time spent waiting around is really time spent guessing and second-guessing where to be when the storms fire off. Storms develop at their own pace, and they do so on a vast scale hunting them presents the complexities of a chess board as big as the continent. Undergraduate meteorological students, in shorts and T-shirts printed with complex thermodynamic formulas, toss footballs and speak in the meteorological argot of CAPE and sheer, dryline convergence and rotation aloft. Chase vehicles decked out with decals or retrofitted to look like “Mad Max” extras sit in parking lots alongside Doppler-on-Wheels trucks, whose stowed radars look like giant Martini glasses. On big-weather chase days in Oklahoma, the scene is like a travelling weather-geek circus combined with big-game hunt.

In 2008, NBC Universal bought the Weather Channel from Landmark, for $3.5 billion. Batten had harnessed catastrophilia, the commerce of awe, trading on an abstracted spectacle of destruction and, sometimes, death. The channel eventually hit pay dirt: people liked watching the weather, but they really liked watching disasters. of Landmark Communications, a regional newspaper and Auto Trader-type-freebie conglomerate, decided to prove to the world that the weather was a near-perfect advertising medium. The Weather Channel débuted in 1982, after Frank Batten, Sr., then the C.E.O. We may be drawn to big weather, according to the historian Daniel Boorstin, because weather (along with sports and crime) exemplifies the kind of spontaneous event that is not organized or manipulated by advertising or spin. A tornado is a supercell’s destructive exclamation point. These straight-line winds, along with the outflow winds, get sucked into the updraft and are super-cooled as they rise, then cascade back to earth, spreading out like pancake syrup, and they cause a significant amount of damage on their own. The inflow of a supercell storm feels like standing behind a jet blast at takeoff. Supercell storms, which can tower more than fifty thousand feet over the prairie, are among the largest visible structures on earth. At 11 A.M., the Norman, Oklahoma, branch of the National Weather Service had issued a statement saying, in effect, that, if a thunderstorm formed, there was a high probability that it would produce a violent tornado. The secret of tornadogenesis remains a mystery in truth, because of the laws of chaos theory, tornadoes may represent the absolute outer limit of what humans can know and predict about nature. It is a testament to how far the science of tornado forecasting has progressed that everybody knew something big was going to happen, and that it was going to happen on that day.