Tim Samaras' harrowing mission: predict a tornado's track, arrive before it does, and deploy a probe he's designed directly into the twister's violent, swirling path, and then promptly get out of the way! "It all started when I was about six years old and saw that fantastic tornado in The Wizard of Oz," Samaras says. As a severe storms researcher, he now spends every May and June roaming the Midwest's Tornado Alley in a van packed with instruments that he uses to predict where deadly tornadoes will touch down.

Samaras achieved a landmark success June 11, 2004, when he dropped a probe outfitted with video cameras into the path of a tornado tearing through the Iowa countryside. The tornado passed within ten feet of the probe, which captured the closest video footage ever recorded of the fierce winds around a tornado's center. The footage enabled Samaras to calculate wind speeds of 125 miles per hour, and to begin modeling the deadly winds in the lower thirty feet of a tornado. Ultimately, such a model will lead to more precise forecasts—and earlier warnings that will save lives.

Samaras' work takes him close enough to tornadoes to witness their full sound and fury. In South Dakota one June day in 2003, Samaras came within 100 yards of an approaching twister. "The rumble rattled the whole countryside, like a waterfall powered by a jet engine. Debris was flying overhead, telephone poles were snapped and flung 300 yards through the air, roads ripped from the ground, and the town of Manchester was literally sucked into the clouds," recalls Samaras. A probe he dropped survived a direct hit to provide "a gold mine" of data to the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

Samaras' exciting but dangerous work has been covered in the April 2004 and June 2005 issues of National Geographic, and also on the National Geographic Channel's Explorer series.

Chasing Tornadoes
For more than 20 years Tim Samaras has been following his passion of chasing storms in order to better understand and predict their path with the goal of creating better warning systems and saving lives. Samaras shares dramatic footage from his adventures along with bits of scientific insight gained along the way in this riveting presentation.