Stormchasers Are Among the Dead In Friday’s Powerful Tornadoes
June 3, 2013
Powerful tornadoes killed 18 people in and around Oklahoma City last Friday, including 3 veteran storm chasers. The lead scientist killed was meteorologist Tim Samaras, the founder of TWISTEX (Tactical Weather Instrumented Sampling in Tornadoes Experiment), a project aimed at increasing lead times for tornado warnings. Two other chasers with Samaras also died—his son Pete Samaras and colleague Carl Young. Tim Samaras had been featured for five seasons on the Discovery Channel’s “Storm Chaser’s” program.
Storm chasers travel in vehicles with such special weather equipment as mobile Doppler radar to gather storm data. (© Byron Turk, Center for Severe Weather Research)
Storm chasers travel in specially equipped vehicles and try to get close to a tornado to study it. The men were following an EF3 tornado near El Reno, Oklahoma. (The EF stands for Enhanced Fujita Scale, named by meteorologist and storm researcher Tetsuya Theodore Fujita.) An EF3 tornado has wind speeds up to 165 miles (266 kilometers) per hour. Friday’s powerful storm suddenly turned course, and the TWISTEX team was caught in their truck, a very dangerous place to be in a tornado. High winds that night also swept along a Weather Channel vehicle for some 600 feet (180 meters), but those passengers survived.
Friday’s tornado comes less than two weeks after another huge tornado hit Oklahoma. The May 20 tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, left 24 people dead. One of the tornadoes formed on May 31 followed in the path of the twister that devastated Moore on the 20th.
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