Tim Samaras: The Great Storm Chaser

A pair of tornadoes near Cherokee, Oklahoma. (Eugene R Thieszen/Shutterstock)

“Follow the yellow brick road!” Tim Samaras (1957–2013) begrudgingly sat in front of the television. His mother had convinced him to watch “The Wizard of Oz” with her. The movie’s impact was less about the yellow brick road, Dorothy, or her meeting the Wizard of Oz. Rather it was the mode of transportation which brought Dorothy to the color-filled world that fascinated him: the tornado.

Samaras was born in Colorado, the state directly west of Dorothy’s Kansas. As a young boy, he was inquisitive about how things worked. At night, he snuck small home-appliances into his room and dismantled them to study how they worked.  This displeased his parents, but it quickly became obvious he possessed an engineer’s mind. He decided early on that college was not for him. His engineering education came from his own research, study, and application.

A Non-Academic Academic

By the age of 21 , he joined the academic realm, though not to pursue a degree. His engineering brilliance landed him a job as a staff engineer with the Denver Research Institute at the University of Denver, a position he held from 1978 to 1996. After his time with the Institute, he joined Applied Research Associates (ARA) as an engineer, where he specialized in blast testing and quickly became involved in the investigation of the TWA 800 explosion. The explosion of the Boeing 747, on July 17, 1996, killed all 230 crew members and passengers. The National Transportation Safety Board awarded Samaras with a service commendation for his contribution to the investigation.

The idea of tornadoes, how they formed, and their specific power structure was a force Samaras could not resist. He decided to go all in on studying the climatic phenomena.

A New Enterprise

After leaving ARA, he formed TWISTEX — the Tactical Weather Instrumented Sampling in Tornadoes Experiment. His new enterprise would change the study of tornadoes forever.

Part of this attempt to “sample tornadoes” was to probe inside a tornado and conduct temperature and atmospheric pressure readings. Samaras wasn’t the first to come up with this idea. In the 1980s, Al Bedard and Carl Ramzy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Environmental Research Laboratory, designed a device fittingly called TOTO, after the dog in ”The Wizard of Oz." TOTO was an acronym for TOtable Tornado Observatory. But TOTO, failed to produce usable scientific data. Samaras was discouraged to pursue the endeavor. People discouraged samaras from pursuing the research.

“Fortunately, I didn’t listen,” Samaras recalled.

Samaras’s primary goal was to protect people from tornadoes, and he believed that the only way to truly save lives was to understand why these powerful funnels formed. More knowledge would lead to earlier warnings. In order to understand the storms, though, he had to chase them. As Samaras once noted, knowing what was taking place at the “lowest ten meters of a tornado” was vital because that’s “where houses, vehicles, and people are.”

A Record Setting Chase

TWISTEX was a small operation. For years, Samaras sold his storm chase video footage in order to make ends meet. It wasn’t dangerous stunts in the name of supposed science; Samaras contributed to meteorology, submitting his research to journals and providing actionable data.

On June 24, 2003, he got his biggest break. By this time, he'd already built a tornado sampling device he called the “turtle,” which he aimed to place in a tornado’s potential path. He and his colleagues were following an EF-4 tornado near Manchester, South Dakota. The tornado razed the town. After surveying the area, Samaras realized his device had done more than survive. It captured the tornado. The results were placed in the Guinness World Record. The “turtle” recorded an atmospheric pressure drop of 100 millibars in a matter of seconds. The accomplishment made him a household name in the field of meteorology.

He was not known only in the field of meteorology, though. When the Discovery Channel came calling with their new show “Storm Chasers,” he gained notoriety. National Geographic named him one of its “Emerging Explorers” in 2005. The National Geographic Society believed in his work and ability so much that they underwrote his work 18 times. He became one of the nation’s most accomplished and respected tornado scientists.

As his fame grew, more money came in for TWISTEX. The enterprise was still on a shoestring budget, but Samaras knew where to put the money, just like he knew where to go to find tornadoes. He purchased more equipment, including a fleet of Chevy Cobalts, as well as a Cold War era one-ton camera that could shoot 150,000 frames per second. After Samaras finished tinkering with the camera, it could shoot 1.4 million frames per second. He used the camera, which he nicknamed “The Big Kahuna,” to photograph lightning strikes.

The Last Tornado

Samaras’ son, Paul, followed in his father’s footsteps, and joined TWISTEX as a photographer and videographer.

A decade after Samaras’s historic storm chase, he collided with his last. On May 31, 2013, he, Paul, and longtime colleague Carl Young, found themselves in El Reno, Oklahoma—part of Tornado Alley.

The three were chasing a powerful tornado, something they'd done many times before. This one was approximately a mile wide. They were piled into the Cobalt: Paul took the video, Young drove, and Samaras tried to maintain visibility of the tornado through the blistering rain. They had three “turtles” in tow. They never got the chance to place them.

The mile-wide twister suddenly expanded to 2.6 miles wide. Although its external winds weren’t highly powerful, the interior of this massive tornado was the most dangerous. There were countless other tornadoes called sub-vortices, most around 200 yards wide, spinning at speeds approaching 300 miles per hour. Any tornado can be a storm chaser killer, but this one, upon expanding so rapidly, almost seemed intent on chasing Samaras. This time, it was not the man who caught the tornado, but the other way around.

In a matter of seconds, and for reasons that still remain perplexing—whether the car suddenly stalled, a tire went flat, or the three couldn’t place the storm’s exact location—the small sedan couldn’t escape the tornado’s path and was sucked into the storm. All three men were killed.

The remains of the TWISTEX vehicle found approximately five mi southeast of El Reno, Oklahoma. National Weather Service. (Public Domain)

​The meteorological community was in a state of shock.

“Tim was a courageous and brilliant scientist who fearlessly pursued tornadoes and lightning in the field in an effort to better understand these phenomena,” National Geographic stated. “This is an enormous loss for his family, his wide circle of friends and colleagues and National Geographic.”

Upon hearing of the tragedy, Jim Cantore, who has long been the face of meteorology, noted, “This is a very sad day for the meteorological community and the families of our friends lost. Tim Samaras was a pioneer and great man.”

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