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Time: 4:19
More than 1,000 tornadoes touch down in the U.S. every year. When most people are running away, one team of scientists heads straight for the action.
Tim Samaras’ harrowing mission: to predict a tornado’s track, arrive before it does, deploy a probe he’s designed directly into the twister’s path—and then get out of the way. He now spends every May and June racing through the Midwest’s Tornado Alley in a van packed with weather recording instruments.
Successful deployments gather the data Samaras needs to model more accurately the deadly winds and predict the tornado’s path. Since the current warnings average a slim 13 minutes, every second counts in the race to save lives. Samaras achieved landmark success in 2004: first on June 11, when he dropped a probe into the path of a tornado tearing through the Iowa countryside. The tornado took the bait, passing within 10 feet of the probe, capturing the closest video footage ever recorded inside a tornado’s center. Two weeks later, in South Dakota, he dropped 3 probes directly in the path of a half-mile wide F4 tornado, containing winds over 200 miles per hour, recording a 100-millibar drop in barometric pressure—the largest in recording history. In May 2009, National Geographic Books released Tornado Hunter, a book about Samaras’ work.
Presentation Topics
Chasing Tornadoes
For more than 20 years Samaras has been following his passion of chasing storms to better understand and predict their path. In this riveting presentation Samaras shares dramatic footage from his adventures and bits of scientific insight gained along the way.
Learn More About Tim:
ABC News: Scientists Put an Eye in the Heart of the Storm
National Geographic News: Storm Chaser Deploys Probe, Makes History
As tornado season touches down in the U.S., see a high-tech tornado chaser’s stunning footage of twisters—and of lightning as you’ve never seen it, in super-slow motion.
Of nature’s weapons, tornadoes are among the most unforgiving, and here’s an unforgettable portrait of these storms and one extraordinary man who challenged them—and produced the first-ever photographs snatched from a rampaging twister’s black heart.
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