Reed Timmer has been chasing storms for greater than 20 years, since he intercepted his first twister in northern Oklahoma as an undergrad majoring in meteorology. Throughout that point, Timmer, who usually logs greater than 50,000 miles on the street annually, has intercepted numerous tornadoes, every one serving to to additional his extreme-weather data. “We nonetheless don’t fully know what occurs inside a twister,” says Edgar ONeal, a climate journalist who’s Timmer’s chase accomplice.
Enter the Dominator. That is the third iteration of Timmer’s custom-built twister cell, which he initially rolled out within the late 2000s. The present Dominator has the chassis of an F350 and weighs 10,000 kilos, enabling it to face up to the particles, gorilla hail, and 150-mph winds that accompany probably the most highly effective of storms. Based on Timmer, his “holy grail” is to drive the Dominator to inside a quarter-mile of a tornado, then shoot a rocket loaded with sensors instantly into the center of the twister. Timmer has completed this as soon as: In Could 2019, the rocket tracked the vortex’s strain drop and frigid air temperature. His staff’s hope within the coming yr is to launch dozens of rockets on the similar time into the swirling updraft of a tornado’s “influx notch.” However even when all these rockets fail, the Dominator is filled with its personal sensors to seize beneficial scientific information. “That’s the entire level,” says ONeal. “You possibly can launch probes right into a twister, otherwise you might be the probe, and that’s the Dominator.”
