More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. Add content advisory. Did you know Edit. The tornado, in Oklahoma, ended up turning towards them and resulted in their deaths. Goofs There are numerous instances throughout the series where footage is spliced in from future or past episodes as evidenced by the inconsistent appearances of the vehicles with or without instrumentation, flags, etc.
User reviews 5 Review. Top review. Best Reality Series. Out of all the Reality Series, this has me at the edge of the seat. Details Edit. Release date October 17, United States. United States. Truly Original. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 44 minutes. Related news. Jan 1 The Wrap. What this small production has done is excellent and produces two very solid seasons.
If you are looking for a more "behind the scenes" look on chasing aka:Real this is it. Not everything is identical to what you see watching Twister. Details Edit. Release date September 19, United States.
United States. Official site. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 20 minutes. Related news. Feb 4 Tubefilter. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Edit page. Hollywood Icons, Then and Now. See the gallery. The Rise of Will Smith. Watch the video. Recently viewed Please enable browser cookies to use this feature. We haul across the Oklahoma border and reach again into the Texas Panhandle. By we're in cattle country, where the towns are rawboned, as if the buildings had been scoured into packing crates by the prairie wind.
We pull into Lipscomb, Texas, and a car full of local women rolls up. But we're late, and out of position. If we try to drive around the storm, we won't have enough daylight left to see it. So we decide to "punch the core" of the thunderstorm, forcing our way into the "bear's cage," an area between the main updraft and the hail.
It's an apt name: Chasing tornadoes is like hunting grizzlies—you want to get close, but not on the same side of the river. Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you. And so we head straight into the storm and find ourselves splattering mud at 60 miles an hour 97 kilometers an hour on a two-lane road, threatening to hydroplane, visibility near zero.
Anton is less than comforting. It's like small meteorites banging down. When the storm spits us out, we stop to look back at the supercell steaming across the prairie. Its top is shaped like a giant anvil, and lightning flashes from it like artillery.
Stacks of cumulonimbus clouds pompadour from its top, and dark wisps of clouds curl like imps from the "wall cloud" that has dropped from its rear flank; that's where tornadoes are known to originate. We sprint into position down a country road and—how does this happen? Down the road are the headlights of local spotters, many of them sheriff's deputies. Spotters will react on the side of caution, and account for many false tornado sightings.
But spotters' vigilance saves lives and property. The supercell moves in with an immense, dark, roiling tapestry of clouds that leaves us gaping. Hail roar—hailstones clattering against each other as they fall from high in the storm—resonates like a Harley-Davidson. The storm does not deliver a tornado, but after it passes, lightning scorches the sky for half an hour. Brad Carter, Tim's chase partner for this trip, shakes his head. If I had seen one right away, on the first trip, maybe I wouldn't have gotten so hooked.
Disappointments arrive daily now. The morning strategy sessions, the long drives, the wild chases across the High Plains, the spectacular busts. It's been two years now without a tornado worth documenting.
The tornado season is another matter entirely. It starts with an explosive string of May storms that roar through Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri, leaving entire towns for dead. But we're still either a step behind or a step ahead. On the way to Colorado, my chase partner, Scott Elder, and I pull into Pierce City, Missouri, where just two weeks before an F3 had flattened homes and left the tidy brick shops and restaurants on the town's main street in rubble.
Sixty survived there. Over pancakes one morning, Jon Davies, a veteran meteorologist from Kansas, outlines a paradox,"it's so hard to reconcile the destruction of towns and people suffering," he says,"with something you enjoy doing.
You won't see me whooping and hollering under a tornado. These things turn people's lives upside down. Tornadoes have also ripped the southern plains in the season, and by the time Carsten, Scott, and I join Tim and Anton for the chase, they have already dropped one probe into a Texas twister.
Joshua Wurman's DOW trucks were out on the same storm, so there is complementary data to feed into the computer models. Before his project, in more than ten years of trying, scientists had managed to place such an instrument exactly once: A team from New Mexico Tech made the first successful drop in By June 4 we're in a caravan of four cars barreling back down to Texas, where we chase a supercell tagged with a tornado warning into Clayton, New Mexico.
On a farm road between fallow cornfields, we find ourselves perpendicular to the storm's inflow wind. Hail hacks at our rooftops. Red-brown soil flows across the road like liquid waves. And then the world seems to simply disappear. I can see nothing but Tim's red brake lights in front of us.
The convoy grinds to a halt as a sandstorm rages, its winds approaching 70 miles an hour kilometers an hour , Tim estimates. Somewhere out there a tornado may be brewing. Tim's van begins to rock. Anton's face turns ashen.
We can't see the road, only the tops of telephone poles. Twenty minutes pass. Tim finally radios us: His GPS shows a T intersection in the road ahead that we could reach, and so we roll blindly, foot by foot, out of the sandblaster.
We learn later that there was a tornado somewhere in that storm, but we sure as hell couldn't see it. Our field time is running out when we caravan into northern Nebraska on June 9.
Dew points are looking good there, and the National Weather Service promises a convergence of shearing winds. For the 30th time, this may be the day we finally see a tornado. We head into the undulating dunes of the Sand Hills. The AM radio crackles with static.
Turkey towers—tall, thin cumulus clouds that bubble upward—trot along the northwestern horizon. We'll get off the highway and assess the situation. Guided by the usual mix of computer images and eyeballing, we zigzag toward the South Dakota border, and by late afternoon we're in storm mode. A dark anvil lowers in the hurly-burly western sky. Hanging beneath it is a wall cloud—like an outboard motor to the vessel of the supercell.
Nervous technical jargon flies back and forth: "21Z analysis field shows a millibar low developing southward around Ogallala," Tim radios. The sky is now rotating majestically, and a confused bird flies into our windshield with a thump, leaving a stain of blood and feathers. And then a triangle of cloud lowers and sharpens into something pointier and leaner. It gathers into a funnel like an elephant's trunk, with the texture of soft gray cotton.
It whirls like an apparition, no more than two miles three kilometers from us, looking alien in the landscape, as if a spaceship had landed. So, it's happening—after three years of futility. I'm finally going to see a tornado. The tornado snakes down to the fields, where it's chewing up a maelstrom of soil and vegetation. It seems to stand almost still, and suddenly it's gone!
It just lifts up, as if the sky were withdrawing a finger back into its fist. But we're still racing toward the core of the storm, which will probably spawn more tornadoes. Flashing lights and hee-haw sirens of emergency vehicles roar by.
The sky looks heavy enough to sink and crush us when we see another twister bullying across the fields—a squat, malevolent-looking wedge. But it's already past, and we're too late to catch it. We drive to Orchard, Nebraska, the hail still pelting the cars in the approaching darkness. We're gleeful just to have seen tornadoes, but Anton tosses cold water on the celebration as we heat sandwiches in a gas station microwave.
This was a total project failure. Most of us won't get another chance. Scott, my chase partner, has already returned home, and now it's time for Anton and me to move on to other projects.
But Carsten stays behind with Tim, insisting on a little more time. Over the next two weeks they grow increasingly frustrated. Tornado chasing season is usually over by mid-June.
By June 23 they have only one field day left, and Tim is "starting to doubt whether we know what we're doing. When the tornado retreats in that fearful twilight, Tim and Carsten find the countryside obliterated of landmarks.
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