RIDERS ON THE STORMTornado chasers hurtle into the eye of ferocious storms, armed with the confidence that their WorkStars® will keep them safe.BY ROD O’CONNOR PHOTOS BY ROARK JOHNSON

It’s a sweltering late-spring afternoon and you can feel the electricity in the air across the wide-open fields of the Great Plains. Ominous gray storm clouds clutter the sky as a cara-van of 11 trucks careens northwest along U.S. Route 275 in eastern Nebraska—right through the heart of Tornado Alley.

In the lead is DOW 7, one of three futuristic “Doppler on Wheels” mobile radar vehicles racing into the belly of the fast-gathering thunderstorm that looms menacingly on the horizon. With their hulking antenna dishes and communica-tions masts that project 56 feet into the sky, the trucks look ready for a lunar mission. But these modified WorkStar® vehicles are concerned with uniquely earthly adversaries—the most dangerous imaginable, in fact. They are on the hunt for twisters.

TRACKING A MONSTER This storm season has been painfully quiet for these weather-obsessed road warriors who have racked up thousands of miles crisscrossing the highways of America’s broad (and particularly vulnerable) midsection hoping to chase down a tornado. Today’s late-afternoon downpour shows alarming potential.

Bursts of lightning spur the team to scramble into action. Suddenly the voice of Joshua Wurman, president of the

Center for Severe Weather Research (CSWR), crackles over the radio: “We have a wall cloud!” he barks, referring to the billowy monsters gathering above. “DOW 7 is pulling over for a scan.”

At this point, the radio chatter intensifies between Wur-man and his fellow atmospheric scientists. “Do you see that cloud lowering? Is it rotating?” asks Paul Robinson, CSWR’s research meteorologist, trailing behind in DOW 6. Herb Stein, the group’s top driver, jerks DOW 7 to an abrupt halt along the dusty shoulder of the road and flips the switches for the truck’s four hydraulic load-levelers. Four legs sprout from its sides, one by one, making the truck look like a Transformer. Within seconds they lift the chassis a foot off the ground. The eight-foot-wide radar dish turns and spins like a carnival ride.

Wurman, 51, pops his head out of the truck. His salt-and-pepper hair is mussed. He looks exhausted, which is under-standable considering the sweltering submarine-like condi-tions inside the truck’s steel-fortified rear cabin. Perched next to Wurman in a swivel chair—amid mangled bags of road snacks and piles of paper—is senior research scien-tist Karen Kosiba, 35. She’s lean and wiry, wearing a black tank top, and she stares intently at two of the 15 computer screens crammed into the 5.5-foot-high, 8.5-foot-wide and 6-foot-long cabin.

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Kosiba concentrates on the color-coded images of radio waves from deep inside the storm that are displayed on the DOW’s screens. (These super-computers can collect up to several terabytes of data per day.) Wurman hops off the side of the truck, does a quick scan of the skyline and adjusts his glasses. “Right now, we’re in wait-and-see mode,” he says, like a Captain Ahab who’s well acquainted with the habits of his intended prey.

YEARS OF CHASING HISTORY Best known for his appearances on the Discovery Channel hit series Storm Chasers, Wurman has been studying Mother Nature’s dark side for more than two decades. He cut his teeth working for the National Center for Atmospheric Re-search in his current hometown of Boulder and launched the CSWR in 2001 to chase storms on his own terms.

His projects have spanned the globe and run the gamut of virtually every meteorological menace—including tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards and wildfires. For their current research project, called ROTATE (Radar Observations of Tornadoes and Thunderstorms Experiment), Wurman and his crew of fellow scientists, volunteers and academics—a team of more than 30 hard-core weather hunters traveling in three DOW trucks and eight “scout” vehicles—hope to capture data on low-level winds inside the swirling tornadoes.

“We’re trying to understand what the winds near the ground are like in tornadoes, because those are the winds that cause damage,” says Kosiba. The thinking is that by increasing knowledge of how tornadoes form, the team can develop better warning systems and

shelters, resulting in fewer casualties.Over 18 years, Wurman and his team

have intercepted 170 tornadoes. Amaz-ingly, no one has ever been injured. “And sometimes we’re in the worst pos-sible driving conditions you can imag-ine,” he says. That includes sheets of pounding rain, unrelenting wind gusts and softball-size hail that batters every inch of their vehicles.

Wurman’s first-generation DOWs were mounted on light-duty trucks that could barely handle the equipment needed for this dangerous work. By 2008 it was

time for an upgrade. Wurman went to McCandless Truck Center in Aurora, Colo. He wanted a tough, commercial vehi-cle that could transport the equipment’s weight; but he also needed a truck that would be easy to drive, so anyone on the team could legally hop behind the wheel. It also had to be durable enough to withstand the most hostile weather—and reliable enough not to strand his team in remote areas.

“We offered a WorkStar that was better suited for their operation than what they were using at the time,” says McCandless’ sales rep, Ken Conway. “They need to have confidence in what they’re driving.”

When asked about the trust he has in his WorkStars, Wurman shares a recent uncomfortable encounter with a tornado on a rural road in Arkansas. “Usually we can get out of the path, but this time it was coming down the road after us,” he recalls. “It was at night, in tremendous rain, hail, terrible conditions. This vehicle kept us ahead of that tor-nado. Part of the mission is getting out alive, so that we can do the next one.”

To fortify the WorkStars for storm duty, Wurman col-

These weather-obsessed road warriors have racked up thousands of miles crisscrossing America’s midsection hoping to chase down a tornado.

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laborated with Richey Inc., a Denver-area body shop that specializes in severe applications ranging from emergency vehicles to oil rigs. Following Wurman’s detailed diagrams, owner Jeff Richey and his staff took on and handled most of the welding and steel fabrication, reconfiguring the truck exactly to the team’s specs.

They bolted down the radar apparatus and mast and built the specialized hydraulic outriggers. They also added ad-vanced lighting systems with warning flashers and spotlights for scanning dark roadsides. A 12.5-kilowatt generator was installed to power up the computer drives and transistors in-side the cab. Finally, a large 240-gallon fuel tank was placed along the rail, allowing the DOW trucks to travel 1,200 miles without having to stop to refuel—an especially important feature when being chased by a tornado or pursuing a hur-ricane. “We’ve worked with Richey’s for years to get the systems exactly how we want them,” says Wurman.

Right now, all of those systems are being put to the test. The DOWs hurtle past cornfields and cattle farms along Route 6 in a mad dash to outrace the building storm to Mead, a tiny town 30 miles west of Omaha, to give the team a perfect vantage point.

Soon a crowd assembles along the ridge where the DOW 7 WorkStar is parked for recon. The clouds loom darker and more menacing, while the wind kicks up dirt like a high-powered tractor. Onlookers point excitedly toward what appears to be a fast-forming funnel structure. But it soon becomes obvious that there’s no wind rotation within the puffy mass.

BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME After about 20 minutes, Wurman decides that there will be no tornado today. The group is disappointed. But after weeks of relentlessly pursuing their quest, there’s a sense of excitement in the now significantly cooler air. The storm chasers actually had something to chase—which is what they’re hardwired to do. “Being a tornado scientist means being an optimist,” Wur-man says with a wry smile. “Because if we knew where the tornadoes were going to happen, we wouldn’t have to be doing this.”

To Wurman, tomorrow is always another day. According to the radar readings, there is some heavy weather already making its way toward Kansas. And as the team climbs back into the DOW’s cab, Wurman knows one thing for certain: He has a truck that’s ready for whatever the angry atmo-sphere has in store.

In fact, just a couple of weeks later, one of the DOWs drove directly into the path of a tornado in central Kansas, with winds exceed-ing 100 mph. The storm demolished a home right next to the truck, but the DOW emerged unscathed.

“The crew and truck weathered the tornado in fine shape,” says Wurman, from the safety of his home in Boulder. “We collected unprecedented data from a reading that was lower to the ground than ever before. The WorkStar was tough and reliable in the most extreme conditions.”

For Wurman’s team, that makes for a perfect storm.

“It was in tremendous rain, hail, terrible conditions. This vehicle kept us ahead of that tornado. Part of the mission is getting out alive.”

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE WORST KINDTHREE STORMS THAT PUT JOSH WURMAN’S TRUCKS TO THE ULTIMATE TEST

1 SPENCER, S.D., TORNADODATE: May 30, 1998MAXIMUM INTENSITY: F4ESTIMATED DAMAGE:

$18 million

A DOW vehicle measured winds of over 220 mph to get within a mile of this tornado’s center. The tiny town of Spencer, 45 miles northwest of Sioux Falls, was leveled by the storm.

2 OKLAHOMA CITY, TORNADODATE: May 3–4, 1999MAXIMUM INTENSITY: F5

ESTIMATED DAMAGE: $1.2 billion

During the largest tornado out-break ever to hit the state, an early DOW measured the high-est wind speed ever recorded: a mind-blowing 301 mph.

3 GALVESTON, HURRICANE IKEDATE: Sept. 13, 2008MAXIMUM INTENSITY:

Category 2ESTIMATED DAMAGE: $37.6 billion

Perched on a highway overpass in Galveston, a WorkStar DOW rode out 100-mph storm-force gusts during one of the costliest Atlan-tic hurricanes of all time—second only to Katrina—just as it made landfall.

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