Severe-storms researcher Tim Samaras was 55.
Photograph by Carsten Peter, National Geographic
Published June 2, 2013
Tim Samaras, one of the world's best-known storm chasers, died in Friday's El Reno, Oklahoma, tornado, along with his son, according to a statement from Samaras's brother.
"They all unfortunately passed away but doing what they LOVED," Jim Samaras, Tim's brother, wrote on Facebook, saying that storm chaser Carl Young was also killed. "I look at it that he is in the 'big tornado in the sky.'"
Tim Samaras, who was 55, spent the past 20 years zigzagging across the Plains, predicting where tornadoes would develop and placing probes he designed in the twister's path to measure data from inside the cyclone. (Read National Geographic's last interview with Tim Samaras.)
"Data from the probes helps us understand tornado dynamics and how they form," he told National Geographic. "With that piece of the puzzle we can make more precise forecasts and ultimately give people earlier warnings."
Samaras's instruments offered the first-ever look at the inside of a tornado by using six radially placed high-resolution video cameras that offered complete 360-degree views. He also captured lightning strikes using ultra-high-speed photography with a camera he designed to capture images at one million frames per second.
Samaras's interest in tornados began when he was 6, after seeing the movieThe Wizard of Oz. For the past 20 years, he spent May and June traveling through Tornado Alley, an area that has the highest frequency of tornadoes in the world.
Samaras's team used probes that Samaras designed to measure the pressure drops within the tornadoes themselves, but the results were often frustrating. Tornadoes developed from only two out of every ten storms the team tracked, and the probes were useful in only some of those tornadoes.
But when the probes did work, they provided information to help researchers analyze how and when tornadoes form.
"This information is especially crucial because it provides data about the lowest ten meters of a tornado, where houses, vehicles, and people are," Samaras once said.
In 2003, Samaras followed an F4 tornado that dropped from the sky on a sleepy road near Manchester, South Dakota. He deployed three probes in the tornado's path, placing the last one from his car 100 yards ahead of the tornado itself.
"That's the closest I've been to a violent tornado, and I have no desire to ever be that close again," he said of that episode. "The rumble rattled the whole countryside, like a waterfall powered by a jet engine. Debris was flying overhead, telephone poles were snapped and flung 300 yards through the air, roads ripped from the ground, and the town of Manchester [was] literally sucked into the clouds.
"When I downloaded the probe's data into my computer, it was astounding to see a barometric pressure drop of a hundred millibars at the tornado's center," he said, calling it the most memorable experience of his career. "That's the biggest drop ever recorded ... like stepping into an elevator and hurtling up a thousand feet in ten seconds."
Samaras received 18 grants for fieldwork from the National Geographic Society over the years.
"Tim was a courageous and brilliant scientist who fearlessly pursued tornadoes and lightning in the field in an effort to better understand these phenomena," said Society Executive Vice President Terry Garcia in a statement on Sunday. "Though we sometimes take it for granted, Tim's death is a stark reminder of the risks encountered regularly by the men and women who work for us."
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