In Oklahoma: Chasing Twisters

It is 11:45 a.m., and Gene Moore is scanning the cloudy skies, pulling on a cigarette, adjusting the treble on his stereo and aiming his blue Ford pickup truck toward western Oklahoma.

He is out to catch a tornado. To be exact, Moore is a storm chaser, and when he catches up with a tornado, it is not uncommon for him to bring it back alive on film. Thereafter scientists at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., can study it in the relative safety of the lab. Catching tornadoes sounds about as unlikely a sport as herding partridges on horseback. But when conditions are right, the NSSL sends out several vans packed with photographers, meteorologists and equipment, assorted airplanes and platoons of experts in hope of harvesting storm data. When people in Texas or Oklahoma or Kansas start running for their lives from a tornado, Moore and his colleagues are usually running full speed into it.

Today NSSL has word of storms moving east from the border near the Texas Panhandle. It has already loosed four aircraft, including one armor-plated job equipped to penetrate the severest storms. Six special Doppler radars, which are sensitive even to frequency changes in falling raindrops, have been focused on the western part of the state. And three storm chase vehicles like Moore's are rolling westward.

Severe weather is expected all over the state, and the scientists at the Norman laboratory, operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) laboratory, have just launched the second part of a ten-week storm project called Sesame 79. Part 1 examined regional atmospheric conditions. Part 2 is aimed at collecting data from specific storms. Nobody in the Great Plains is pleased to learn that a tornado is on the way. But these scientists, engaged in a $3.5 million project to help measure and ultimately predict tornadoes and severe storms, are excusably excited.

Moore is 32 and still working on his degree in meteorology at Oklahoma University. He admits fieldwork appeals more to him than the written thesis that still separates him from a degree. But he is regarded as an expert contract worker and weather photographer, and when tornadic storms are pelting his truck with hail and threatening imminent catastrophe, Moore's language can be impressively scientific. He has caught up with and photographed more than 60 tornadoes in the past eight years, and he speaks expertly of anvils and shears, gust fronts and vortexes, lips and inflow bands.

"I always watched storms when I was young," Moore says. "I figured when I got old enough, I'd follow one and see what it was like." Sometimes these days, he sees them a bit too well. As the pickup hurtles along Route 66, Moore recalls his last big storm. It ended up chasing him all over north central Texas, then dispersed, then treacherously re-formed and became the deadly tornado that killed more than 40 people last April in Wichita Falls. Moore outran it for 15 minutes, until it crossed the road behind his truck. Says he: "It sounded just like a commercial jet landing."