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• The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2018

1. The man who caught the storm : the life of legendary tornado chaser Tim Samaras https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017075 Hargrove, Brantley, author. The man who caught the storm : the life of legendary tornado chaser Tim Samaras / Brantley Hargrove. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018. 1 online resource. ISBN: 9781476796116 (ebook) 2. The man who caught the storm : the life of legendary tornado chaser Tim Samaras https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014605 Hargrove, Brantley, author. The man who caught the storm : the life of legendary tornado chaser Tim Samaras / Brantley Hargrove. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018. pages cm QC941 .H295 2018 ISBN: 9781476796093 (hardcover)9781476796109 (pbk.)

• Brantley Hargrove - https://www.hbrantleyhargrove.com/about/

  Journalist. Occasional storm chaser.
  Ed Grubb

  Ed Grubb

  Brantley Hargrove is a journalist who has written for Wired, Popular Mechanics, and Texas Monthly. In his reporting, he has explored the world of South American jewel thieves who terrorize diamond dealers in South Florida. He's gone inside the effort to reverse-engineer supertornadoes using supercomputers. And he has chased violent storms from the Great Plains down to the Texas coast, including a land-falling Category 4 hurricane and one of the rarest tornadic events in recent memory: twin EF4 tornadoes that chewed through a small Nebraskan farming village. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Renee, and their two cats. The Man Who Caught the Storm is his first book.

  Please get in touch at brantley.hargrove@gmail.com if you'd like Brantley to write for you.

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  Journalist. Author of THE MAN WHO CAUGHT THE STORM from Simon & Schuster
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  I'm a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in D Magazine, Texas Monthly, Popular Mechanics, and WIRED. My first book, THE MAN WHO CAUGHT THE STORM, from Simon & Schuster, is out now. Find out more here: hbrantleyhargrove.com

  Email me at brantley.hargrove AT gmail DOT com if you'd like me to write for you. Below are a few examples of my recent work:
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Hargrove, Brantley: THE MAN WHO CAUGHT THE STORM
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hargrove, Brantley THE MAN WHO CAUGHT THE STORM Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 4, 3 ISBN: 978-1-4767-9609-3
An adroit biography of a thrill-seeking storm chaser.
Dubbing tornadoes "the only real dragons the modern world has left," journalist Hargrove, a weather fanatic himself, chronicles the life of the intrepid Tim Samaras. The author charts Samaras' fascination with twisters back to an inquisitive childhood, when he was transfixed by the tempest in The Wizard of Oz and the raw power of severe weather systems in his native Colorado. From youthful tinkering to an early gig at the Denver Research Institute to becoming a prominent self-made engineer, Samaras also got married and had a son (whom he dressed as a foam tornado for Halloween). He dove head-first into his obsession after accessing real-time weather technology and meteorological gadgetry, which, as it advanced in sophistication over the decades, only served to heighten his insatiable curiosity and boundless enthusiasm to stand "inside the lungs of a storm." An autodidact, he amassed knowledge and an impressive skill set through his experiences working for and in conjunction with a variety of tornado scientists and enthusiasts. Samaras constructed his own weather instruments and logged countless hours locked in the paths of tornadoes across the Midwest, the Southeast, and beyond. Hargrove refreshingly contributes quality information on what intrigues and motivates storm chasers, their unique camaraderie, and the evolution of the sophisticated tracking equipment in use today. The author, who never met Samaras, builds his biography through recordings, interviews, research, extensive video footage, and connections with his family, friends, colleagues, and "chase buddies." Despite repeated warnings by peers that his increasingly perilous chases were venturing toward the suicidal, Samaras remained addicted to "the euphoric rush of pulling up just in time to see the cloud wisps gather and descend." Samaras perished after being swept up in a tornado in Oklahoma in 2013, but Hargrove's debut biography honors his legacy as an unparalleled storm
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chaser.
An enthralling profile of a storm enthusiast and adrenaline junkie who took his intense interest to extreme measures.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hargrove, Brantley: THE MAN WHO CAUGHT THE STORM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb.
2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247956 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f26eda46. Accessed 28 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527247956

QUOTED: "Hargrove's biography will gratify severe-weather fans while memorializing its protagonist."

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The Man Who Caught the Storm:
The Life of Legendary Tornado
Chaser Tim Samaras
Gilbert Taylor
Booklist.
114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p19. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras. By Brantley Hargrove. Apr. 2018. 320p. Simon & Schuster, $26 (9781476796093); e-book, $13.99 (97814767961). 920.
Tornado-chaser Tim Samaras was a Coloradan self-taught electronics technician who began to pursue twisters out of personal interest in the late 1980s. Once TV stations began purchasing his tornado videos, Samaras set out on a path to serious scientific research when he was contacted by a credentialed engineer who needed a daredevil to help obtain meteorological measurements from inside a tornado, Describing the risks Samaras took, thus attracting publicity and financial support from National Geographic and the Discovery Channel's Storm Chasers, Hargrove ably infuses his tale with a pulse-pounding element. Hargrove also brings forth Samaras' diffident stance toward professional scientists once he built his instrument, which, in 2003, obtained the first-ever data from inside a tornado. That triumph brought Samaras into science's world of conferences, publications, and grants. But, independent and proud, he turned down offers of collaboration and reverted to pursuing tornadoes on his own, until 2013 when he, one of his sons, and a colleague died tracking an Oklahoma twister. Derived from extensive interviews with Samaras' family and friends, Hargrove's biography will gratify severe-weather fans while memorializing its protagonist.--Gilbert Taylor
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Taylor, Gilbert. "The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim
Samaras." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 19. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A532250810/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=bd77a536. Accessed 28 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250810

QUOTED: "Hargrove not only skillfully presents Samaras's life story but also the collective story of a storm-chasing subculture."

3 of 5 5/28/18, 9:53 PM

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The Man Who Caught the Storm:
The Life of Legendary Tornado
Chaser Tim Samaras
Publishers Weekly.
265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p74. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras Brantley Hargrove. Simon & Schuster, $26
(320p) ISBN 978-1-4767-9609-3
In this insightful biography, journalist Hargrove charts the interests and achievements of tornado chaser Tim Samaras, who died in a tornado with his 24-yearold son in 2013--Readers familiar with Discovery Channel's Storm Chasers will be familiar with Samaras, and with help from Samaras's family, friends, and colleagues, Hargrove paints a complete picture of the engineer while providing lessons on the science behind tornadoes--"one of the most awesome expressions of force in the natural world." As a boy in 1960s Colorado, Samaras was fascinated with The Wizard, of Or "He couldn't take his eyes off the tornado as it roped over the fields toward Dorothy and Toto." Samaras would grow up to track tornados alongside older, more practiced scientists and meteorologists. Eventually, he chased tornadoes throughout the Midwest and Southwest. Hargrove describes the camaraderie that storm chasers can build over time, the "intimate proximity" that develops when "chasing across states with the same group in the same vehicle. " Hargrove not only skillfully presents Samaras's life story but also the collective story of a storm-chasing subculture. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras."
4 of 5 5/28/18, 9:53 PM

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Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 74. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A525839819/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e81758fd. Accessed 28 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839819
5 of 5 5/28/18, 9:53 PM

"Hargrove, Brantley: THE MAN WHO CAUGHT THE STORM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247956/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f26eda46. Accessed 28 May 2018. Taylor, Gilbert. "The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 19. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250810/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=bd77a536. Accessed 28 May 2018. "The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 74. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839819/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e81758fd. Accessed 28 May 2018.

• Longreads
  https://longreads.com/2018/04/11/chasing-the-man-who-caught-the-storm-an-interview-with-brantley-hargrove/
  Word count: 4643

  Chasing the Man Who Caught the Storm: An Interview With Brantley Hargrove

  “If you’ve had the luck of actually seeing a tornado, man, that’s like nicotine. It gets under your skin.”
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  Jonny Auping | Longreads | April 2018| 15 minutes (4,096 words)

  In his recently released book, The Man Who Caught the Storm, Brantley Hargrove tells the story of an unlikely legend named Tim Samaras, who lived his life grappling with and addicted to one of nature’s most dangerous marvels.

  Samaras was a tornado chaser with a simple but absurdly treacherous goal: to get close enough to a twister to glean data from within its core. Hargrove, who spent months on the road chasing tornadoes for the reporting of the book, retraces and recreates Samaras’ most dramatic missions, culminating on May 31, 2014 in El Reno, Oklahoma, where he would face off with the largest tornado ever recorded. That same tornado would take Samaras’ life along with those of his son, Paul, and fellow chaser Carl Young.

  “We now live in an era when the Mars Pathfinder rover has touched down on the Red Planet,” Hargrove writes. “The human genome has been mapped. But twisters still have the power to confound even the most advanced civilization the planet has ever known.”

  Samaras legacy and life’s work represented a crucial foundation for how to better understand and predict historically unpredictable tornadoes.

  But The Man the Who Caught the Storm is hardly a meteorological textbook. Rather Hargrove weaves a uniquely American tale of adventure — “nowhere else on the planet do tornadoes happen like they do in this country,” as he explained to me — diving into the circumstances and makeup that leads a man to chase what he should be running from.

  Lacking even a college degree, Samaras was an outsider in the meteorological community, who not only developed one of the most sophisticated information-gathering probes the field had ever seen, but also had the courage (or perhaps unrelenting urge) to personally drop that probe in front of a twister.

  Hargrove sat down with Longreads to discuss tornadoes, his own storm chasing, and the addicting thrill of being in the presence of something that can cause unfathomable chaos and destruction.

  When did you first find out about Tim Samaras?

  I think the first time he really came on my radar was on May 31st, 2014 or maybe the day after on June 1st when I’d heard about what happened.

  It seemed almost kind of impossible. I was like Is this true? I mean, a 2.6 mile-wide tornado was not something I’d ever heard was possible. And this guy trying to get data from it. It set off all these alarm bells, and I wanted to know who this guy was and why he was trying to get so close.
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  When did you know you wanted to write something significant or book length about him?

  I would say probably immediately.

  I thought this was a story that cried out for a really detailed telling. I was at the Dallas Observer at the time so that seemed like the best way to get into it. Start small and get a basic feel for how this happened and who this guy was. I was able to do that. They sent me out there to do that. But even as I was reporting that story I was like Somebody should write a book about this person. Why not me?

  Let’s talk about tornadoes in general for a minute. You wrote in the prologue that until recently the core of a tornado was as untouchable as the surface of the sun. In the past five years tornados have wiped out entire cities. Why has key information been so elusive about these things that are pretty common?

  Yeah, they’re incredibly common. There are like a thousand every year. But it’s still hard to predict where they’re going to come down.

  I was riding with really seasoned storm chasers, and we busted a lot. They’re a super transitory occurrence. Sometimes the atmospheric mechanisms that are going to produce them don’t even become apparent until that afternoon. For a lot of years it was very hard to collect data from them because it was so hard to predict when they’re going to come down.

  As we developed more tools that were more effective at gathering data, like Doppler radar, that still left some blind spots. Radar operates on line of sight so when you’re scanning a tornado from a distance of a mile, you’re dealing with the curvature of the earth interrupting the radar. You’re dealing with trees and houses and stuff like that. So you’re getting a lot of the upper part of the tornado, but you’re blind to what’s going on near the ground, and that’s where we live.

  Other countries do have tornadoes, but not like we get them here…. We are not lucky. Though chasers would say we’re extremely lucky.

  It was a big missing piece, and to some respects, it still is. If you can’t see what’s going on where we build our houses and where we live, you’re missing a large part of the puzzle. That’s a blank space in the equation.

  Researchers have been trying for decades to get that kind of data. It’s hard to find tornadoes to begin with. It’s even harder to maneuver in front of them and then drop an instrument that can survive once it’s been run over, if you’re even lucky enough to get it run over.

  Researchers had been trying to do it for decades, which is what made Tim kind of like this incredibly unlikely person to pull it off.

  I thought it was interesting how there’s this complex science, but then the practicality of what they’re trying to do is actually really easy to understand. You have to get the probe close enough to the tornado to collect the data from the core, but it has to be built structurally to somehow prevent it from flying away once it’s in the tornado’s presence.

  Simple in theory, extremely difficult in practice.

  It’s relatively easy to attribute a geographical location to hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Can you explain what makes up Tornado Alley and is that part of the country overlooked in terms of the risk it presents from a natural disaster?

  Nowhere else on the planet do tornadoes happen like they do in this country. We are far and away the most tornado-scattered place in the world.

  Is that pure chance?

  No, it’s not. It’s a coincidental alignment of geographical features. We have cold polar air coming down from the north. We have a dry, westerly mid- to upper-level wind coming out of the west over the Rockies. Then we have this surge of Gulf moisture in the springtime coming out of the Gulf of Mexico. When those three air masses collide, as they do each springtime, very bad things happen.

  Nowhere else on earth has those elements. Other countries do have tornadoes, but not like we get them here.

  Not as common?

  Not as common and not as violent.

  We are not lucky. Though chasers would say we’re extremely lucky.

  This book couldn’t have been done without a certain amount of explainers on how tornadoes form and are tracked, but I think there’s no question that it’s more of a character-driven book than a science-driven book. Was that approach something you were conscious of and decisive about from the beginning?

  This book went through a pretty significant winnowing process.

  At the outset, I had one whole chapter about Ted Fujita who was one of the godfathers of tornado science. I had chapters about my own chases, going out with some of Tim Samaras’ colleagues and buddies, going out and seeing F4s. I had whole chapters about just my adventures.

  At one point, my editor, John Cox, and I decided that this book needed to be much more narrowly focused. As cool and interesting as my own experiences were out there chasing tornadoes, the reader, we hoped, would be gripped by Tim’s story and then feel that my stuff was an unnecessary distraction.

  We made a choice that this was a book about Tim Samaras, tracking his rise and ultimately piecing together what went wrong at the end. The reader needed to know some science to understand what was going on and understand why what Tim was trying to do was so significant. But we didn’t want to overburden the book with that.

  I can imagine if I had these experiences with tornadoes and then written about them, it would be painful to take that out.

  Deeply painful [laughing].

  I had spent several weeks out on the road, driving every single day and sleeping in some shitty motel, and spending a lot of money, frankly, going chasing.

  The last week that I was out, we had this transcendent experience with these four F4 tornadoes in one afternoon. And I was like Wow, this book. I just hit the jackpot. I had just had an experience that very few people in the world have ever had. That kind of event probably won’t be seen again in my lifetime.

  But in the end, I think I saw that whatever pride I had in the experiences I had while reporting this book had to be secondary to the story. And the story is Tim.

  You had to put Tim’s story ahead of your story. You also never let the tornado become a bigger character than the tornado chaser. The tornado doesn’t have a family. It doesn’t have friends or a personality.

  Initially the book was just called “The Storm.” Then we made a conscious decision as we were finishing up the manuscript that this book isn’t really about the storm. The tornado’s a character that Tim is matching up against. But he’s the real focus.

  A tornado is present in almost every chapter, but then there’s this sort of serendipitous chapter about a long lost son that’s dropped in there. It’s almost as shocking anything in the book.

  We almost didn’t include that chapter, but in the end, I thought it was important. I thought it was illuminating about Tim as a person. He didn’t have any obligation to this kid, who was a grown man. But he took it upon himself to bring him into his family. I thought that spoke in an interesting way about Tim’s character. My editor and I both agreed it needed to be part of the story, even if it wasn’t necessarily serving this straightforward narrative that we were building towards. It was a character-building moment. It showed that Tim was a pretty damn good guy.

  He’s having such a good time. He’s doing what he loves. He’s exactly where he’s supposed to be in the world… He’s in the presence of what will ultimately kill him.

  Let’s talk about the reporting process. You never met Tim. What sort of things did you rely on primarily to tell his story?

  Primarily interviews with everybody who would talk to me; his wife, his daughters, his brother, his son, his colleagues, his brother-in-law and neighbor, people he worked with, and people he butted heads with, just everybody that I could think of.

  One of the great things about storm chasers is they film everything they do. All their chases are generally on tape. So I had this incredible access to all his chase footage. All these chases from like 1990 to 2013. This incredible vault that allowed me to watch him in his element. I can hear what he’s saying. I can see what he’s seeing. That was an enormous help.

  Was that surreal and eerie to watch that footage? These are dangerous missions, the same sort of missions that would take his life.

  In a sense it was. Because you see some close brushes. You can see where he was getting a little too close, maybe pushed a little too far. In that sense, you can kind of see the trajectory of where he’s headed.

  But at the same time, there’s also a tremendous amount of joy in those images. You can hear it in his voice. He’s having such a good time. He’s doing what he loves. He’s exactly where he’s supposed to be in the world.

  I guess you could say it’s kind of both. He’s in the presence of what will ultimately kill him.

  I imagine that writing the book without his wife Kathy’s cooperation would have been nearly impossible.

  It would have been a piece of shit.

  Did you have to sell her on participating in the book?

  Kathy and I have come a long way. Whenever we first started talking was less than a year after she lost her son and her husband. I think it was strange for her at first, but we exchanged information.

  That August 2014 was the first time we sat down for an interview. It was quite a lengthy interview. I think we talked for six or seven hours. It was difficult for her. Obviously it was incredibly painful for her to talk about these things. She was going through something that I couldn’t even fathom. And I tried. I tried putting myself in her shoes, and I just couldn’t imagine the magnitude of that loss.

  Do you know if she’s read the book?

  Yes, she read the book before anyone but my editor read it. As you can see, the book is dedicated to her and my mom.

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  Tim was an outsider. He didn’t have a college degree. He’s sort of this scientific savant with an adventurer’s mentality. On paper, he was dramatically unqualified to be in the meteorological community. Outside of maybe an extra chip on his shoulder, what sort of advantages do you think his DIY education lent him for tornado chasing?

  He was really good at teaching himself things. Part of his duties when he was getting on the team for his day job as an explosives expert at Denver Research Institute, he had to teach himself physics and electrical engineering. That’s some dense stuff.

  I think he approached storm chasing the same way. I think that his experience, working with these high-speed electronics and trying to figure out how to characterize and measure extremely dangerous events that you don’t want to be anywhere near, in some ways, was the perfect experience that this field had been waiting for, to develop an instrument that could actually live in that place. Not only live in it, but return with data.

  You spent a lot of time with storm chasers, some of whom just did it for hobby. You went along with them on these missions. Was there any sort of common thread or personality trait that draws people to this dangerous and frustrating work?

  Most chasers are just hobbyists. A minority of them actually chase for science. For the most part it’s a hobby. I met a bunch of them. They come from all walks of life.

  It’s just, once you’ve seen one — if you’ve had the luck of actually seeing a tornado, man, that’s like nicotine. It gets under your skin.

  Tim was one of the few chasers that had a specific mission with a lot on the line. There’s this sort of back and forth between achievement and thrill. What do you think drove Tim more: the desire to glean information that could maybe someday protect people or just the adrenaline of being so near death and this natural marvel? Is it possible to parse out those motivations?

  I think they’re all inextricable.

  Tim was an intensely curious person. He was a problem solver. He had thrown himself body and soul into developing these remarkable instruments. He wanted to put them to the test. And he wanted to see if he could do what a lot of people said was impossible.

  What he had to do was get in front of one. That is just not a place you ever want to be.

  At the same time, I mean, he thrilled at being in the presence of these storms. Once you’ve seen them and you understand the vast magnitude of the ocean of atmosphere that contributes to severe storms, it’s almost like a riddle. It’s like a puzzle. You’re trying to solve it and locate the pieces that are going to make it all come together.

  I don’t think he could separate it out. I think he wanted to contribute to the science. I think he wanted to make his chasing mean something. But I think he also enjoyed the hell out of it.

  He would have been doing it anyway.

  Yeah, he would have been. Even if he wasn’t deploying probes, he still would have been out there chasing.

  He developed these sophisticated, never before seen probes that could measure a tornado, but the process by which he had to go about getting it to the core was seemingly unsophisticated and incredibly dangerous. He essentially had to find a tornado, predict its path, get in front of it, drop a probe, and then drive off before the tornado got him. Am I wrong in thinking that’s an insane way to gather data?

  Make no mistake, it was incredibly dangerous. What he did was orders of magnitude more dangerous than what I did back in 2014 when I went chasing for this book.

  What he had to do was get in front of one. That is just not a place you ever want to be. But that’s where his storm chasing skill came in. That’s honestly where some of his nerve came in. The guy just had nerves of steel.

  There’s simply no other way to get that kind of data. If you want to get on-the-ground, in situ data you got to get in front of that thing and drop your instrument package. Because radar is probably one of the most useful tools in atmospheric science, but it can’t get that ground level data. If you want to get it, you’ve got to do it the way Tim did it.

  Tim takes part in a mission in Stratford, Texas in 2003. It’s a successful chase, but it very nearly turned tragic. There was debris flying over his car and baseball size hail. His partner on that mission stopped chasing with him after that. He said, “You can only roll the dice so many times before things go wrong.” Was Tim in denial of that logic or was he just a man possessed?

  I don’t think any of us can ever really see how dangerous something we’re doing is becoming.

  I think he intuitively understood the odds game. I’m just not as sure that he could see it in relation to himself. He tried to be careful. But the nature of what he was trying to do was inherently dangerous.

  It’s a tough question and one I wrestle with in the book. What was his understanding of the risk? Because there’s no making safe dropping a probe in the core of a tornado because if you make it safe then you’re not going to get it in the core of a tornado. You have to be pretty close. You have to wait, to use the cliché, until you can see the whites of its eyes. There’s no making that safe. I think he understood that, but I don’t know if he saw how dangerous what he was doing was becoming.

  The most dramatic and perhaps the most detailed scene of the book was of the tornado that took the life of Tim and his son, Paul, and his partner, Carl, in Oklahoma. How were you able to reconstruct that scene?

  I had a lot of help. Gabe Garfield, who was a research meteorologist, knew Tim and Paul and Carl. It wasn’t clear who was going to figure out exactly what happened. So he took it upon himself because he had more access to the relevant materials — the video footage, the radar imagery, all that stuff — than anyone else did.

  He conducted this really intensive study, probably more for Kathy than for anyone else.

  He took me on the drive. Every turn that they took that day. He drove with me and sort of annotated it. Here’s where the tornado was. Here’s what they would have seen. Here’s what they were saying in the car.

  So I was able to put it together using a variety of different media and using Gabe as a resource to moment by moment, minute by minute, second by second understand what they were seeing and experiencing. And what their decisions were. We can’t be in their head, but we know what they did and we know what they were saying to each other [from surviving audio from within the car]. You can infer with pretty high confidence why they made their decisions.

  Retracing Tim’s missions and life story, I imagine that was a grueling task, piecing together stories from various sources in order to tell a complete story. It sort of reflects a point you make about storm chasing. It can be very boring, and the near misses have to be demoralizing. You were in a unique situation where you were chasing a tornado chaser. Did you empathize with their missions?

  Oh my God, yeah, absolutely.

  You have to travel thousands of miles just to see one cool thing. I completely empathize with putting all these resources on the line and coming up short time after time. How frustrating that is.

  I don’t think any of us can ever really see how dangerous something we’re doing is becoming.

  My chasing, even though it’s not on the pages, it infuses a lot of my understanding of Tim. Just the exhaustion you feel. The long hours you spend driving and staying in these shitty motels. Eating this bad food. Those were all my experiences, too.

  It wasn’t until I went chasing that I really understood the guy. Because I was thinking I really need to see some tornadoes. If I’m going to write a book about a guy who made his life work gathering data on tornadoes, by god, I better see some. I felt an incredible amount of pressure to see some. So I can only imagine, Tim’s got this grant money from National Geographic on the line. He’s got to produce something.

  Did ego play a part in Tim’s death?

  That is a good question.

  I don’t know if ego is the right word. Maybe confidence.

  I think Tim had been in the presence of incredibly dangerous storms many times. I think there was a certain level of comfort that he had gained. I think that was an especially dangerous combination for a storm that really no chaser or scientist has experienced.

  The El Reno, Oklahoma tornado did things that I don’t think any chaser would expect a storm to do. It grew in scale tremendously. It went from a big tornado to an enormous, record-breaking tornado. Around the same time, it sped up. It started going about highway speeds. And it made a pronounced turn to the north. Tornadoes don’t usually do all those things. So it caught him off guard. And it wrapped itself in rain so they couldn’t see it. They didn’t know where it was.

  It was essentially a tornado designed to kill storm chasers, and a tornado especially designed to kill somebody like Tim.

  How will climate change affect tornadoes going forward?

  We don’t really know, honestly. There’s some research that indicates that warming oceans are going to release more water vapor into the air, which produces instability, which is what tornadoes feed on.

  There’s also research that indicates that convergent winds coming in different directions, which is another key ingredient for tornadoes, might actually decrease.

  So in some sense, it’s kind of a wash. But I think a growing consensus is that while it may add up to fewer overall tornadoes, the outbreaks that you do have, whenever all the mechanisms come together, might be really, really bad. Like worse than anything we’ve ever seen.

  Tim wasn’t even supposed to be in Oklahoma that afternoon for a deployment. He just couldn’t resist. You’ve mentioned your own storm chasing throughout this conversation already, and in the author’s note you mentioned that even after you finished the book you went back and chased more storms, understanding the allure they hold over chasers. Can you articulate what’s so addicting about it?

  It’s being in the presence of something that’s almost an aberration of nature. Seeing something that very few people in the world will ever see. I think there’s an element of being in the presence of something you know could kill you very easily.

  It’s beautiful.

  Tornadoes and tornadic storms with their striations — the way they rotate — it’s almost like a sculpture. They’re transcendently beautiful. And being in the presence of one, every follicle of hair on your body will stand on end.

  * * *

  Jonny Auping is a freelance writer based in Dallas, Texas. His work has been featured in Texas Monthly, The New Yorker, VICE, New York Magazine, Slate, and McSweeney’s.

  Editor: Dana Snitzky
  Posted by Jonny Auping on April 11, 2018
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• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/29/books/man-who-caught-storm-tim-samaras-brantley-hargrove-interview.html
  Word count: 1080

  Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: A Dangerous Journey Into the Heart of Tornadoes

  By John Williams

  April 29, 2018

  Image
  CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

  “He wanted to answer the questions people thought were impossible.” That’s how one friend of Tim Samaras described the storm chaser and scientist who died in 2013, along with one of his sons and a colleague, in an Oklahoma tornado. Fifty-five at the time of his death, Samaras had in fact answered some previously impossible questions, using probes of his own design — placed in front of twisters at moments of great danger — to glean facts about what happens in the very center of a tornado. The journalist Brantley Hargrove’s first book, “The Man Who Caught the Storm,” recounts the obsessions and the unlikely achievements of Samaras while also detailing the history of scientists’ often slow pace in understanding this corner of meteorology. Below, Mr. Hargrove, who lives in Dallas and has chased storms himself, talks about his fascination with this story, the many adventures he cut from the final book and more.

  When did you first get the idea to write this book?

  It was shortly after May 31, 2013, the day Tim Samaras died. Being a denizen of Tornado Alley here in Texas, I’m pretty aware of weather. It had been a crazy month. May 20, an EF5 tornado tore through Moore, Oklahoma. Eleven days later, we were under the gun again. The National Weather Service was putting out some pretty dire language. I follow some chase accounts on Twitter, and I could see what was going on that day. It was unbelievable. Several days later, when the news started to filter out about what had happened and who had been killed, I was shocked. I was familiar with Samaras — I had seen his show “Storm Chasers” on the Discovery Channel and knew a little about his mission. But I wanted to learn more. Why did he get so close? What was he trying to find? So I begged my editor at the Dallas Observer to let me write this story, which honestly had nothing to do with Dallas.

  I knew even before I had written the story that this was probably a book. In the alt-weekly world, you don’t get a lot of time to luxuriate in a story. You have to turn it around pretty quickly. I felt that I hadn’t even scratched the surface.

  What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

  Just how little we know about tornadoes. We’ve come a long, long way, but some fundamental questions remain unanswered. There are times when we still struggle to predict them with specificity. When you live in a city, our dominion over the natural world can seem complete. It’s nice to learn there are still some mysteries.
  Image
  Brantley HargroveCreditCatherine Downes

  I was stunned by the fact that when Samaras came on the scene at the turn of the 21st century, we had no data on ground level from the core of a violent tornado. We’re the most advanced civilization the world has ever known. But this was one place that we hadn’t been. We’ve been to the moon, we’ve seen Mars, but the core of a tornado was terra incognita. It’s a testament to just how dangerous it was for Tim.

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  In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?

  It’s vastly different. The initial manuscript I turned in was 112,000 words. There were whole chapters on Ted Fujita, the godfather of tornado science. There was a chapter where I visited a vortex simulator at Texas Tech that used Samaras’s data. I had chapters where I’d go out storm chasing with some of Tim’s best buddies and colleagues, and we saw monstrous tornadoes. I had these incredible adventures and experiences, and you can imagine how painful it was to cut them completely out of the book. We took the meat cleaver to it. The final product is about 80,000 words, and I think that’s all for the best. As interesting as those chases I went on were, I think the book is better for having a laser focus on Tim and his life and work.

  Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?

  One singer I’ve always loved and I think is probably one of the greatest living songwriters is James McMurtry. He has lines that any writers — not just songwriters — would envy. I’ve always admired his ability to capture the zeitgeist. I remember when “We Can’t Make It Here” came out during the Bush administration and we were locked in these wars.

  I know we’re not supposed to talk about writers but his father, Larry McMurtry, has been a big literary influence on me. So that whole family; I guess it’s in the blood.
  EDITORS’ PICKS
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  Persuade someone to read “The Man Who Caught the Storm” in 50 words or less.

  It’s for anyone interested in the natural world and finding that there’s still plenty of awe and wonder out there. And anyone interested in a uniquely American character who didn’t go to college and yet made some of the biggest advances the field of atmospheric sciences had ever seen.

  This interview has been condensed and edited.

  Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt.

  The Man Who Caught the Storm
  The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras
  By Brantley Hargrove
  295 pages. Simon & Schuster. $26.

  Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter (@nytimesbooks), sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.
  A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2018, on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: Discovery and Danger, Twisting All About. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

• D Magazine
  https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2018/03/heres-a-good-book-for-your-summer-reading/
  Word count: 274

  Here’s a Good Book for Your Summer Reading

  The Man Who Caught the Storm, by Brantley Hargrove
  By Tim Rogers Published in FrontBurner March 26, 2018 8:00 am

  Brantley Hargrove is a handsome man. As others have noted, he is “muscled, clean-shaven, with Greco-Romanesque locks.” He looks really good in Carhartt. I imagine he looks really good out of it, too.

  Maybe that sounds like I’m objectifying him. Let’s start over.

  Brantley Hargrove, the sometime D Magazine contributor and former Dallas Observer writer, will publish his first book this month. It is The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras (Simon & Schuster). It’s a really good book. Kirkus Reviews wrote: “Brantley Hargrove is a dreamy hunk of a man who really turns our pages, if you get our meaning.”

  That’s not true. I made that up. Here’s the Kirkus review. They called the book “enthralling,” and I agree. I’m not a big meteorology freak, and I don’t care about storm chasing. But Brantley had me hooked the whole way. I was especially impressed with how he was able to describe many storms, and lethal tornadoes in particular, without going purple or getting redundant. Kidding aside, Brantley is a great writer.

  That’s why we excerpted his book in the April issue of D Magazine. Have yourself a taste, then go for the full meal. He’s delicious. I mean it’s delicious! The book!

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• U.S. Tornadoes
  http://www.ustornadoes.com/2018/04/04/review-the-man-who-caught-the-storm-the-life-of-legendary-tornado-chaser-tim-samaras/
  Word count: 1198

  ew — The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras
  Apr 04, 2018
  by Mark Ellinwood in Tornado Chasing

  He lived on the cutting edge, then it all got cut short. His story is as unique as the phenomena he sought. Tim Samaras is one of the most revered storm chasers in history, and through his character and actions, he carved out a legendary life that may never be matched in our world.

  “The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras” is, as the title suggests, about the life of Tim Samaras. He was a man who sought education and knowledge through unconventional means and made a success of himself despite all the personal and professional hurdles he encountered. A tinkerer turned in situ scientist, Samaras saw the seemingly unachievable as a constant life force to push him beyond what people said could not be done.

  The beginning of the book draws you in not only to the early life of Tim Samaras, but also to the early life of tornado forecasting and research. To understand how Samaras turned the impossible into the possible, “The Man Who Caught the Storm” weaves two histories together while easing the reader into the earliest decades of unraveling the mystery of tornadoes.

  Depending on who you are, such a setup of the history of tornado forecasting and research may be too detailed and elaborate in the book, but I can see why it is necessary for at least some readers to get a grasp on the enormous mountain that is still being climbed by today’s researchers. How much detail to put in rides a fine line and varies by reader, so I think the author, Brantley Hargrove, did a good job in the overall presentation of general tornado history. The book is about a person whose life focus became tornado research, so erring on the side of caution and adding a few extra details doesn’t detract from the story. Weather enthusiasts may gloss over these parts of the book, but for the rest of the readers, it may all be necessary.

  From the early days, the book transitions to a Tim Samaras who has caught the chasing bug. More and more time chasing, and more and more miles are put on his vehicle as each year passes. With little more than a high school diploma and no formal weather education, Tim finds all available weather forecasting and spotting resources to make himself a more successful storm chaser.

  In these early chapters, Hargrove describes not only what Tim experiences, but what all chasers experience. The thrill of watching your first tornado touch down, the disappointment of a busted forecast, the yearning to find another tornado even though you just watched one rope out.

  The TWISTEX team in Iowa in 2009. (Tony Laubach)

  Hargrove also captures what ails Tim and many other chasers. Time and money constraints, leaving your home to become a Great Plains nomad, and even a social hierarchy within the chaser community that can sometimes push back against naïve newcomers. Samaras finds enough support in his early days to gain the knowledge and experience that allows him to work up the chasing ladder. But as the book describes, that is not what Tim is about. He is out there for the storm and to collect the vital data that no one else but him can seem to get.

  Anyone who has chased a storm will personally feel every high and low of Tim’s life journey, chapter by chapter. “The Man Who Caught the Storm” does an excellent job of keeping Tim’s life relatable while also including some proper fanboying over one of the greatest storm chasers that has ever lived. The story was exactly what I was looking for when I first picked up the book. Midway through the book, I was excited to turn through every page to see what next chasing experience came next.

  However as the years go by in each page, the thoughts of the inevitable conclusion come to mind more and more often. In the ride that I don’t want to see end, tears well up in my eyes as I begin the third part of the book. Chase Nirvana is the name of the first chapter of that fateful day. Hargrove has set the stage for an epic that will show how easy it is to flip the switch from a major success to a major failure when butting heads with one of nature’s most powerful forces.

  As I sat well south of the fatal storm that day with my chase partners Ian Livingston and James Hyde, we watched anxiously as the storm morphed and evolved into a massive beast. Dozens of storm chaser GPS marks filled the Radar screen next to the storm. Suddenly, the southern end of the storm cluster rapidly organized and pushed eastward near I-40. Everyone in our car knew what was about to happen as we saw the storm overtake those GPS marks.

  “A storm chaser is going to die in this storm,” I said to the group. Little did I know that it was the man I would least expect to go past the edge.

  This book perfectly captures chasing’s moments. The thrill of catching the big storm, which suddenly turns to terror as the beast transforms into something never experienced before in such proximity. Reading the book made me relive the moments from that day. The wait, the excitement of such a prolific looking setup, the worry about there being too many chasers and being too close to a city, and the desire to throw caution to the wind and attack the storm.

  Then there was the dread, as rumors and our worst fears came to life, both on the computer screen and in front of our own eyes. Every single feeling was captured so well that I had to pause a few times while reading through the book’s recollection of that day.

  Chasers will flip each page fondly, remembering Tim and Paul Samaras and Carl Young as their legacy remains part of history in “The Man Who Caught the Storm.” Others will see a man who seemed larger than life, but whose time on Earth unfortunately concluded suddenly and tragically. Hargrove’s intense and intimate research into Tim Samaras’ life is on full display in this book, and poring through Tim’s story was both enchanting and humbling.

  Prepare to be transported to the Plains and the great tornado hunt through this engaging read!
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  Operational Meteorologist at WeatherBug (Earth Networks). See full bio.
  Tagged with: "The Man Who Caught the storm", "Tim Samaras", book, Review
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• Texas Monthly
  https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/brantley-hargrove-tim-samaras/
  Word count: 1667

  QUOTED: "It remains the largest tornado ever observed, at least that we know about. And it also had possibly some of the fastest wind speeds that have ever been recorded. They made a safe estimate of peak wind speeds that they observed in the El Reno tornado at about 301 miles per hour or so, which is consistent with the fastest wind speeds ever observed on Earth. It was in every sense a superlative tornado, unlike anything anyone has ever seen in modern history."

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  The Culture
  Brantley Hargrove Chronicles the Life of Extraordinary Storm Chaser in ‘The Man Who Caught the Storm’

  The book tells the triumphant and tragic story of Tim Samaras.
  By
  Doyin Oyeniyi
  Date
  May 6, 2018
  Share
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  Tim Samaras

  Drew Angerer/Getty Images

  Armed with a high school diploma and his own inventive abilities, Tim Samaras was an outsider in the PhD-dominated world of professional storm researchers. Yet in 2003, Samaras managed to do what many researchers and storm chasers believed was impossible. In a breakthrough that changed storm-chasing, he managed to place a probe in the center of a tornado. A decade later, Samaras, along with his son, Paul, and fellow storm chaser Carl Young, was killed by an unpredictable tornado in El Reno, Oklahoma. Samaras’s untimely death grabbed the attention of Weir-native Brantley Hargrove, who began researching Samaras. In his new book, The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras, published in April, Hargrove dives deep into Samaras’s adventures, eventually becoming a storm chaser himself. Texas Monthly talked to Hargrove about how he first became interested in tornadoes, Samaras’s work, and his own experiences chasing storms.

  Texas Monthly: What made you to want to write about Tim Samaras?

  Brantley Hargrove: I grew up in Texas, in Williamson County. When I was fifteen, Jarrell [a town near Weir] got hit by an F5 tornado. It just blew everyone away. It was one of the most violent tornadoes that most researchers have really ever seen. It killed 27 people there in Jarrell, specifically in this little subdivision near downtown. Just scraped the foundations completely clean – linoleum, carpet, everything was gone. Even the plumbing. I have distinct memories of driving through Jarrell in the aftermath and just seeing all these driveways that lead to nowhere. I’d never seen no clear evidence that a bunch of people have been lost in almost the same moment with my own eyes before.

  By the time Tim Samaras came along, I heard about his Discovery Channel Storm Chasers show. When [the El Reno tornado that killed Samaras] happened, it was just a time when you could not not pay attention to tornadoes. This Tim character seemed really fascinating and compelling – this guy trying to go out there and get data from the cores of violent tornadoes.

  TM: Samaras was the first to ever get a probe inside the center of the tornado, which is something that you described as basically equivalent to the moon landing. What kind of information do we have available to us now because of that?

  BH: With Tim’s measurement, we actually had real specific wind speed data from the core. You’ve got engineers who now have something specific to build against when they’re thinking about building something that is tornado resistant. Tim [and his research] was the first time they actually had some pretty precise wind speed measurements from the core. Scientists use computers to create numerical models of tornadoes that they can study and try to learn about their structure, and they can actually compare that against the pressure profile that Tim’s probe got it in Manchester, South Dakota. They can look at their idealized numerical vortices and compare them against the real thing. I am not saying Tim Samaras completely solved the puzzle with his measurement, but it sure gave us a big missing piece, and it kind of set the table for everybody else.
  Tim Samaras shows the probes he uses when trying to collect data from a tornado, May 26, 2006, in Ames, Iowa. Samaras left his home in Colorado every spring and traveled tornado alley, which includes parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Iowa, in hopes of placing the probes directly in front of a tornado.

  TM: Did Samaras’s actions shift or change the line between risk and safety for other storm chasers after him?

  BH: Tim was, in essence, walking the tightrope without a safety net. Now storm chasers, just the people who are out there for fun, it’s kind of a different thing. I think what happened to Tim and Carl and Paul was a big wake up call. And I think it is definitely changing their behavior, at least the sensible people.

  TM: The tornado that killed them was the largest tornado ever recorded at that time. Since then, have there been bigger tornadoes?

  BH: No, there have not. It remains the largest tornado ever observed, at least that we know about. And it also had possibly some of the fastest wind speeds that have ever been recorded. They made a safe estimate of peak wind speeds that they observed in the El Reno tornado at about 301 miles per hour or so, which is consistent with the fastest wind speeds ever observed on Earth. It was in every sense a superlative tornado, unlike anything anyone has ever seen in modern history.

  TM: What was the scope of information you were able to find and dig up about Samaras?

  BH: There’s no shortage. I was able to speak several times at length with Tim’s widow, Kathy Samaras. I spoke with his two daughters, and his other biological son. I spoke with his colleagues in TWISTEX, and his colleagues at the Denver Research Institute and Applied Research Associates, which is where he did his day job as an explosives expert. I also had just this wealth of footage of Tim’s own chase footage that was provided to me by Kathy. That’s what chasers do — they film their storm chases, just because they like to have a record. I had hours of footage from Tim’s own deployments from back as far as 1991 up to 2013, where I could practically be sitting next to Tim in the car as he’s trying to intercept the tornado. I can hear what he heard, see what he saw, listen to all the words that he’s saying, and just get a sense for how he behaves beneath the storm.

  TM: Through writing the book and your own storm-chasing, what have you learned about chasing storms?

  BH: One thing I’ve learned is that it takes a tremendous amount of patience and perseverance to see a tornado. It’s not like you’re just going to go out on a storm day and see one. When I went out storm-chasing for this book, I had to spend about three weeks on the road before I saw my first tornado. I drove through pretty much every state in Tornado Alley, thousands and thousands of miles. For the most part, it’s really tough going, and it’s a bit like a puzzle. You’re trying to predict what hundreds of thousands or millions of cubic miles of atmosphere are going to do a couple of days from now or a day from now or hours from now.

  TM: Are you on the look out for any storms in the upcoming weeks?

  BH: I’m going to wait for something with a slightly clear signal in Oklahoma or Texas before I go out again. I’m not willing to invest the kind of time and energy and money that I did when I was reporting for this book and we were going out for a week at a time. I’m looking for a little day chase where I can just leave home, maybe see an awesome tornado, and then sleep in my bed that night.

  Note: This article has been updated to reflect that the storm that hit Jarrell was an F5 tornado.
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• Cowboys & Indians
  http://www.cowboysindians.com/2018/03/the-man-who-caught-the-storm/
  Word count: 1146

  QUOTED: "He’s this middle-class guy from the suburbs of Denver who had a random-sounding set of skills. He was an explosives expert who worked for a defense research contractor, he was an inventor, and he was a storm chaser. He parlayed all these disparate-sounding skills into one thing, which was to take measurements from inside the core of a violent tornado, something he’d been told was incredibly dangerous and probably impossible. Well, he proved the meteorological world wrong."

  Author Brantley Hargrove chronicles Tim Samaras, the groundbreaking self-taught tornado chaser who transformed the field with seemingly impossible breakthroughs.

  Tim Samaras was an anomaly in the field of science that would ultimately take his life. Where others had PhDs, he had a high school diploma and a passionate autodidact’s wealth of knowledge. Through his boyhood hobbies and various jobs in young adulthood, he acquired a seemingly indiscriminate set of skills and areas of expertise that included ham radios, explosive force measurement, and, above all, storms.

  Samaras was the first to place a probe inside a tornado, a breakthrough so many previous researchers had attempted and failed to achieve that it seemed impossible. His daring feats and passion for storm chasing made him a celebrity in the meteorological world and earned him a reality television role. But on May 31, 2013, he, along with his 24-year-old photographer son, Paul, and a meteorologist chase partner, Carl Young, got too close to a storm — the largest tornado ever recorded.

  Dallas author Brantley Hargrove spent more than three years getting to know the late Samaras’ surviving family members and colleagues in TWISTEX, the research organization he cofounded. He also got inside the mind of a chaser, logging thousands of miles with Samaras’ colleagues on their own chases — and in so doing witnessed a historic storm of his own.

  The resulting book is The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras. It’s a vivid, beautifully written, and incredibly reported page-turning tale of a man’s obsession with one of the most powerful forces in nature.

  “The Man Who Caught the Storm is the story of the greatest storm chaser who ever lived,” Hargrove says in a recent interview with C&I. “He’s this middle-class guy from the suburbs of Denver who had a random-sounding set of skills. He was an explosives expert who worked for a defense research contractor, he was an inventor, and he was a storm chaser. He parlayed all these disparate-sounding skills into one thing, which was to take measurements from inside the core of a violent tornado, something he’d been told was incredibly dangerous and probably impossible. Well, he proved the meteorological world wrong.”

  Samaras reached that goal in 2003, but his story is far from over after the monumental achievement. The feat brought him even greater stature among his colleagues and fame outside the world of weather, and he was a lead personality on Storm Chasers from Season 3 in 2009 until the show’s 2012 cancelation. Though no one since his death has duplicated his measurements, Samaras proved that sampling the tornado core was possible. His research yielded precise wind speeds for engineers trying to build safer homes, as well as a crucial baseline for scientists studying tornado structure. Samaras’ personal life also took an interesting turn when, in 2006, Matt Winter, a young man who was obsessed with weather and idolized Samaras, learned there was a good chance his hero was also his father and reached out to Samaras. When a DNA test confirmed his hunch, Samaras welcomed him into the family.
  Brantley Hargrove and an EF4 tornado in Pilger, Nebraska. Photography: Courtesy Ed Grubb

  In researching the book, Hargrove hit the road with members of Samaras’ team. Long hours putting in thousands of miles disabused him of any notion that the exhausting, often boring pursuit had much semblance to the thrill-packed movie Twister — until it did. In June 2014, Hargrove and former TWISTEX researchers Ed Grubb and Tony Laubach holed up at a Super 8 in Grand Island, Nebraska, in the northeastern part of the state where weather conditions showed great potential for tornados. The best, most dedicated chasers usually end up at the same storms, Hargrove says, and on June 16, this proved true once again when they ran into Ben McMillan, another former TWISTEX researcher, at a Wendy’s in Columbus. The four men saw four EF4 tornados that day.

  “That first kind of probing cloud came down out of the sky and gradually sharpened, and then touched down,” he says. “It was really surreal to watch, kind of otherworldly and eerie.”

  The TWISTEX alums and Hargrove followed the twister until it died, and then witnessed what Hargrove describes as a once-in-a-lifetime event: twin simultaneous tornados on the highway ahead of them, each some 500 yards in width. They briefly considered trying to “field goal” themselves but decided not to. One of the twins “roped out,” dissipating into a narrowing tube until it disappeared, and the fourth tornado of the day replaced it.

  The thrill was dampened by the report that the storms caused two deaths. Hargrove was curious about how chasers confront this moral conundrum — the sense that they’re exulting in a force of nature that kills. He found no easy answers, and he isn’t sure they’re necessary anyway. Chasers don’t cause the storms, of course, and sometimes they’re among the first to help victims, showing up even before emergency responders. In some cases, they provide visual confirmation of an ongoing tornado to weather-service forecasters.

  Hargrove’s eloquent description of tornados — both in the book and in conversation — makes it easy to understand how Samaras became so fixated.

  “It’s one of the strangest things that the natural world does,” he says. “Just out of nowhere, there are these swirling winds that could blow a house off its foundation or toss a railcar a few hundred feet.”

  Hargrove describes The Man Who Caught the Storm as “an old-as-time type story about man facing off against the natural world, a story of obsession and bravery, and tragedy.” It’s also a fantastic read that has garnered excellent reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly and praise from acclaimed journalists including Skip Hollandsworth, Susan Casey, Michael J. Mooney, and Hampton Sides.

  Order The Man Who Caught the Storm (April 3, Simon & Schuster) here, and pick up the April 2018 issue of C&I for Hargrove’s story “Riders on the Storm,” about another man who shows true grit in the face of havoc unleashed by a violent storm. Visit hbrantleyhargrove.com for more information and author appearances, and check out the video trailer for the book, above.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/04/02/you-can-only-roll-the-dice-so-many-times-tim-samaras-lived-life-like-a-twister/?utm_term=.a163365c3b7e
  Word count: 1143

  QUOTED: "Hargrove is one today’s great science writers. His book delivers once it gets going. Some early slowness is simply the subject matter when there are no tornadoes. Chasing has its moments, and then a lot of other time is spent with a bunch of geeky (mostly) guys meandering through nowhere. The book will surely enthrall chasers, and it will find a special spot in the hearts of many meteorologists. Everyone can follow along and stay captivated with ease."

  You can only roll the dice so many times:’ Tim Samaras lived life like a twister
  By Ian Livingston April 2 Email the author

  Transient, mystical and deadly. Tornadoes can happen any time, but they ramp up in the spring, when outbreaks typically terrorize large portions of the country. Despite their brevity, their violent winds leave lasting scars on the landscape and in the lives of those touched.

  While most folks will never see a twister, caravans of storm hunters find them every year. Hundreds or thousands of chasers might be active in the Great Plains at any given moment during peak tornado season, but only a handful have plopped themselves close enough to feel the storm’s heartbeat.

  Tim Samaras was one of those storm chasers. His death on May 31, 2013 in El Reno, Okla., at the hands of the widest tornado on record, was hard to fathom. It still is. He and his crew — including his son Paul and his chase partner Carl Young — were legends. We were stunned — this couldn’t happen to them. Not to Tim.

  “The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras” is the story of a guy that sought adventure and knowledge. A man ultimately taken before his time, but not before he changed a field that he forced his way into.

  Brantley Hargrove, the book’s author, is a storm-chasing journalist from Texas. In “The Man Who Caught the Storm,” he takes the reader not only on a journey through the remarkable life of engineer-explorer Samaras, but also through the beautifully desolate roads of the Plains while on the chase.

  As I eagerly flipped the pages, I couldn’t help but feel like parts were about me. I am quite sure other storm-watchers will feel the same. Although I did not know Samaras personally, after reading “The Man Who Caught The Storm,” I can imagine myself having a laugh with him at a waypoint of the “wandering brotherhood,” as Hargrove aptly calls it.

  Samaras first felt the spark as a child at home in Colorado. A snaking funnel cloud sparked a curiosity that grew into passion. Passion became obsession, and the rest is history.

  Many compare chasing to mountain climbing, primarily because both are their own version of extreme. While I can tell you chasers are considerably less fit, there are some real parallels, particularly the potential for injury or death. Unlike today’s mountain climbers, chasing is not just for the accomplishment or the thrill.

  In fact, storm chasing’s roots are in universities and government research. While there are many amateur “rubberneckers” on the roads during severe weather, the pastime originated in the need to study severe storms up close. Samaras was one of those researchers.

  Despite their importance in unlocking the mysteries of what Native Americans called the “Black Wind,” observations close to a tornado remain sparse today. Actually getting data from inside a tornado was unheard of except in Hollywood takes on tornado research. Until Samaras.

  One of his partners was Cathy Finley. When they met, Finley was a former professor living in Minnesota doing research as a private meteorologist. One of the things that drew Finley to Samaras was the idea of getting observations from his vehicle.

  “Nobody collects data there,” Finley jokes in the book, “unless it’s by accident.” The prospect of strapping a weather observation tower to the top of the car excited Finley immensely.

  Pressure traces from Tim Samaras’s probes. The one on left took a direct hit. It was the first instrument recording of a tornado impact. (NWS via Tim Samaras)

  Samaras was an outsider initially lacking pedigree in a field of highly-educated scientists. Hargrove describes some of the tension Samaras felt that may have at times nudged him to push the envelope. Early in “The Man Who Caught The Storm,” Hargrove describes Samaras as someone who “taught himself how to read a weather map and how to identify the morphological features of storms.” Later, Hargrove wrote, “[h]e believed he could teach himself anything he needed to know.” We see throughout the book that Samaras is nothing if not a go-getter.

  There were signs Samaras knew he was playing nature’s version of Russian roulette by repeatedly standing in the path of nature’s most severe winds. Hargrove describes a particularly hairy chase in Stratford, Tex., in 2003.

  “Tim knows they don’t belong here,” Hargrove writes, “but this is what it takes.”

  That was the storm which got Tim’s early chase partner, Anton Seimon to call it quits on close encounters with a tornado. In the book, Seimon is quoted stating, “you can only roll the dice so many times, before things go wrong.”

  So is it hubris, or is this what researchers on the cutting edge of science sometimes have to do?

  Hargrove argues Samaras was seeking answers to big questions in hopes of bettering society. History is replete with the deaths of men and women who had similar desires, and the willingness to walk the tightrope between life and death is part of a particularly American quality. We believe we can conquer anything if we try hard enough.

  That drive has helped us unleash life changing and lifesaving technology. This seems to have been Tim’s goal.

  Hargrove is one today’s great science writers. His book delivers once it gets going. Some early slowness is simply the subject matter when there are no tornadoes. Chasing has its moments, and then a lot of other time is spent with a bunch of geeky (mostly) guys meandering through nowhere.

  The book will surely enthrall chasers, and it will find a special spot in the hearts of many meteorologists. Everyone can follow along and stay captivated with ease. So, sit back and take a journey through America’s heartland with one of chasing’s legends.
  4
  Comments
  Ian Livingston is a forecaster/photographer and information lead for the Capital Weather Gang. By day, Ian is a defense and national security researcher at a D.C. think tank.

• Westworld
  http://www.westword.com/arts/denvers-best-free-events-may-28-through-june-1-2018-10359138
  Word count: 1986

  QUOTED: "I grew up with the Twister generation. The year after the movie’s release, when I was fifteen, Jarrell, Texas, found itself in the path of a monster. Nearly thirty people were killed. To this day, it’s considered the most destructive tornado ever documented, pound for pound. I’d stocked shelves in that town’s general store the year before. I think I was primed for an unhealthy fascination. I’d seen firsthand what tornadoes can do. Here was a man with the guts to face them down and to learn from them. How could I not write about this person?"

  Brantley Hargrove on Chasing Storms and Tim Samaras
  Westword Staff | April 23, 2018 | 6:49am
  AA

  For decades, Tim Samaras chased storms, studying them and vastly expanding the science of what created such severe weather phenomena. Author Brantley Hargrove never met the Denver man, but as he researched his life and death — first for a cover story about Samaras for our partner paper, the Dallas Observer, then for the book The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras — he came to know Samaras. In advance of Hargrove's appearance on Monday, April 23, at the Tattered Cover Colfax, he shared some of his thoughts on Samaras, storms, and writing books.

  Westword: What drove you to write this book?
  Related Stories

  Tornado chaser Tim Samaras's last ride
  Videos: Remembering Tim Samaras, storm chaser killed in tornado alongside son, partner

  Brantley Hargrove: I grew up with the Twister generation. The year after the movie’s release, when I was fifteen, Jarrell, Texas, found itself in the path of a monster. Nearly thirty people were killed. To this day, it’s considered the most destructive tornado ever documented, pound for pound. I’d stocked shelves in that town’s general store the year before. I think I was primed for an unhealthy fascination. I’d seen firsthand what tornadoes can do. Here was a man with the guts to face them down and to learn from them. How could I not write about this person?
  Tim Samaras
  Tim Samaras
  Westword file photo

  What made Tim Samaras become so interested in tornadoes and storm chasing?

  It started with The Wizard of Oz. He was transfixed by the tornado on screen, which even by today’s standards still looks pretty lifelike. Growing up near Denver, on the doorstep of Tornado Alley, twisters were simply a part of his natural world. He wanted to see them up close, but he didn’t know how. In 1985, he saw a NOVA documentary about a troop of researchers who didn’t wait for the the tornado to come them. They chased it down with sophisticated probes. It was a revelation for Tim. He’d never dared to think such a thing was even possible. He wanted to do what these scientists did. He wanted to chase.

  Why do you think that tornadoes are so compelling?

  How often in the natural world do you witness something bigger than any skyscraper roaring over the plains like a vision out of a bad dream? High-end tornadoes contain winds that can loft an SUV for three quarters of a mile. They can strip a house down to its concrete foundation. To see a tornado like that is to feel as though you’re in the presence of an aberration — something that shouldn’t exist but is all too real.

  I understand that you have decided to take on storm chasing yourself. Knowing the risks, what has made you decide to pursue it? What does your wife think?

  To understand Tim Samaras and his world, I knew I needed to walk a few miles in his shoes. I had to see for myself what drew him away from home year after year, like a siren’s song. In Pilger, Nebraska, I witnessed an historic event. We saw four EF4 tornadoes in June 2014. They were each as wide as five football fields laid end to end. Two of them were on the ground simultaneously. That day, I think I understood Samaras a little better. Even after this book was already finished, I found myself drawn back out there. In 2017, a former TWISTEX member and I were forced to hunker down against the wall of a Pizza Hut as Hurricane Harvey’s eyewall passed over us. There’s something addictive about being there as the atmospheric equivalent of a nuclear warhead is detonating. We made it out unscathed, but my wife has since decided that my storm-chasing days are over.

  We’ll see about that.
  Brantley Hargove chasing a storm.
  Brantley Hargove chasing a storm.
  Twitter

  In the course of your research, you have become something of a tornado expert yourself. What are some of the most surprising things that you have learned?

  I know just enough to be dangerous. What fascinates me most about tornadoes is just how little we really know. So many unanswered questions remain. We’ve gotten better and better at detecting the conditions most conducive to producing the really bad days. Yet sometimes these conditions are present and nothing happens. I found that out firsthand while I was chasing. There’s some signal in the atmosphere that we can’t see yet. In fact, we may not even have the tools to see it. I think that’s remarkable. Our dominion over nature is far from complete. There are still mysteries out there.

  If someone wanted to become an amateur storm chaser, what advice would you give them?

  Be careful. Respect the power of the sky. Take a Skywarn storm-spotting course. Find an experienced chaser willing to show you the ropes. And above all, keep your distance, especially from rain-wrapped tornadoes.

  In the last few years, climate change has worsened. Has it had an effect on storms?

  The jury is still out on the effect of climate change on severe storms. There’s some research out there that suggests the frequency of the highest-end events is increasing. As the oceans warm and evaporation rates grow, it makes sense that there’ll be more available heat and moisture in the air. That’s exactly what storms feed on. But there’s also research that suggests an attendant decrease in wind shear, which is also necessary to produce spinning storms. The prevailing theory now is that tornadic storms could be fewer in number in the future. But there’s a big caveat: When they do happen, they may be much, much more violent.

  Samaras’s story is so inspiring, particularly that he was able to become such an innovator in the field of tornado science despite never having gone to college. You write, “He has long been fueled by his role as an outsider.” Could you elaborate on this?
  Tim Samaras became a reality TV star.
  Tim Samaras became a reality TV star.
  Discovery

  Samaras never cared for sitting still in a classroom. He was one of those guys who learned best by following his own passions. He learned by doing. He never took the traditional route, and it had always worked for him. The guy went straight from manager at a mom-and-pop radio-repair shop to instrumentation engineer with a Pentagon security clearance and access to the military’s most dangerous weapons. Samaras came from a culture where you’re measured by what you can do, not by your academic pedigree. Suffice it to say the world of atmospheric science is a bit different. But tell him he isn’t qualified to do something and you’ve just guaranteed that he’s going to give it everything he’s got. Paired with his innate curiosity, I think ambition and a drive to prove the doubters wrong spurred him onto his historic measurement in Manchester, South Dakota.

  Samaras was the first person to be able to measure the atmospheric conditions inside the core of a violent tornado using instruments of his own design, which you describe as “meteorology’s equivalent of the moon landing.” What made this feat so groundbreaking?

  Prior to his measurement of the F4 tornado in Manchester, we had no data at ground level, from the core. Scientists who studied theoretical tornado structure had to guess at what was going on down there. Damage surveyors had to estimate wind speeds based on degrees of destruction to houses and buildings of irregular structural integrity. Radar — an exceptionally valuable tool — couldn’t direct its beam that low. The low-level tornado environment was a blank space in the equation. Samaras filled it in. It wasn’t an answer to all the questions; it didn’t solve the riddle. But it was a damn good start. He proved this was possible.

  You describe Samaras as having been not a thrill-seeker, but very cautious, and how he was successful as a storm chaser because he “succeeded by toeing the line between danger and safety." What do you think went wrong for Samaras with his last storm?
  From Tim Samaras's Facebook page.
  From Tim Samaras's Facebook page.
  Facebook

  Make no mistake: What Tim did — attempting to deploy probes inside tornadoes — was orders of magnitude more dangerous than my own chasing experiences. To get a probe into the core, Samaras had to enter the tornado’s path, a place in which the average chaser should never find himself or herself. During his last chase, everything that could go wrong, did. I believe Samaras, his son, Paul, and meteorologist Carl Young were attempting to head the tornado off in order to deploy. At the end, it did several things that caught them off guard. The tornado accelerated to highway speeds, grew drastically in size, and hooked sharply to the north, toward their vehicle. For much of their chase, the vortex had been wrapped in rain. I don’t think they even saw it coming.

  Is there anything you want readers to take away from your book?

  I hope they walk away from this book with a renewed sense of awe toward the wild and mysterious world around them. I hope it inspires some of them to contribute to what we know about that world, like Samaras did.

  What books did you read in preparation for writing this book? Whom would you consider your biggest literary influences?
  If you like this story, consider signing up for our email newsletters.
  SHOW ME HOW

  Mystery of Severe Storms, by Theodore Fujita, Tornado Alley, by Howard Bluestein, and too many scientific papers to list here. I think The Man Who Caught the Storm can be traced directly back to Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. When I was a freshman in high school, it was the first nonfiction book I’d ever read that had me hanging on every word, every page. I read it again — for probably the fourth time — as I was figuring out how to write my own book.

  What are you working on next?

  That remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has something to do with natural phenomena. The world is an endlessly interesting place.

  Brantley Hargrove will discuss and sign The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras at the Tattered Cover at 2526 East Colfax Avenue at 7 p.m. Monday, April 23. Admission is free; the Simon & Schuster book is $26. Find out more at tatteredcover.com, and thanks to Simon & Schuster and Hargrove for this Q&A.

• Shelf Awareness
  http://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=707#m12413
  Word count: 330

  QUOTED: "Hargrove does a marvelous job mixing heady science with an engrossing and personal narrative. Nirvana for weather fanatics, the storytelling will appeal to a broad audience."

  The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras
  by Brantley Hargrove

  Tim Samaras turned his childhood obsession into a lifelong passion that he used to change the world. Captivated by The Wizard of Oz and a PBS storm-chasers special as a boy, Samaras became the greatest tornado researcher of our time. The Man Who Caught the Storm is journalist Brantley Hargrove's intimate portrait of a fascinating man whose goal was to do the undoable: map ground-level data from the heart of a supercell twister.

  Samaras, a self-taught weather forecaster and electrical engineer, made his living testing weapons systems at the Denver Research Institute, a job he obtained with no experience and a hand-written résumé. The fervor and fortitude that jump from Hargrove's well-researched profile show Samaras as a person who simply would not be denied his legacy. During tornado season, Samaras lived and breathed storms, chasing weather fronts along with funding to continue his research. Featured regularly on Discovery Channel's reality series Storm Chasers, Samaras became a legend in the weather community. He died in 2013, along with his son and another colleague, when a vehicle they were in was struck by a tornado.

  Hargrove does a marvelous job mixing heady science with an engrossing and personal narrative. Nirvana for weather fanatics, the storytelling will appeal to a broad audience, and is infused with the soul of a loving family man on a mission to achieve his dreams, dancing with nature's devil while trying to make the world a safer place. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

  Discover: This is the scientifically detailed yet heartwarming biography of the country's greatest tornado researcher, who developed the first probe to measure data from inside a twister.

• Dallas News
  https://www.dallasnews.com/arts/books/2018/04/02/tim-samaras-biography-man-who-caught-storm-review
  Word count: 916

  QUOTED: "Many of the details are familiar to anyone who follows the field. ... But Hargrove finds fresh stories to tell. With access to Samaras's family, he illuminates the personal demands of storm-chasing. ... The result is a detailed, nuanced portrait of what drove this man into the path of some of the world's most dangerous storms."

  Tim Samaras became a TV star driving into tornadoes; a Dallas writer explains what happened next
  Filed under Books at Apr 2
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  It's tornado season on the Great Plains, so throngs of storm chasers are once again about to spill onto the roads. Some of them are extreme-weather junkies, driving heedlessly into wind and rain in hopes of catching an Instagram-worthy twister. Others are more scientific — following storms cautiously, gathering data to try to crack the mystery of why severe storms develop as they do.

  But almost anyone who has ever intentionally piloted a vehicle towards a thunderstorm knows about Tim Samaras. A Colorado-based engineer, Samaras was best known as one of the stars of the reality-television show Storm Chasers, which aired on the Discovery Channel between 2007 and 2011. If there was a tornadic supercell anywhere on the Plains those years, Storm Chasers showed him either there or doing his best to get there as fast as he could.

  Off-camera, Samaras could usually be found in his home machine shop, where he designed and built innovative instruments for probing extreme weather. Think of Samaras as the guy who made some of those scenes in the movie Twister actually happen. He invented a probe he dubbed "the turtle," which contained a set of sophisticated temperature- and pressure-measuring devices inside what looked like a squat orange cone. In South Dakota in 2003, Samaras dashed ahead of an oncoming tornado, dropped a few turtles in its path, and made the first-ever direct observations of atmospheric pressure plunging inside a twister's core. He still holds the Guinness World Record for steepest pressure drop ever recorded.

  Samaras pushed the limits of storm-chasing engineering. He added new instruments on a metal mast atop the turtle, turning it into a portable meteorological station. He took a Cold War-era camera that the military had used to study nuclear explosions and rejiggered it to photograph lightning strikes at more than a million frames per second.
  The Man Who Caught the Storm, by Brantley Hargrove(Simon and Schuster/ )
  The Man Who Caught the Storm, by Brantley Hargrove
  (Simon and Schuster/ )

  In this new biography, Dallas-based writer Brantley Hargrove explores Samaras's rise to storm-chasing legend. Many of the details are familiar to anyone who follows the field: How Samaras became entranced with tornadoes while watching The Wizard of Oz as a kid. How he first joined and then clashed with academic scientists, who deployed storm-chasing fleets in direct competition with Samaras's small team. How he began selling dramatic tornado videos to help finance his shoestring operation.

  But Hargrove finds fresh stories to tell. With access to Samaras's family, he illuminates the personal demands of storm-chasing — including how Samaras's wife dealt with his dangerous work, and questioned whether he should be taking his sons along for the ride. Elsewhere, Hargrove investigates how Samaras's colleagues coped with his reality-television celebrity, especially when producers goaded them to disparage one another on camera. The result is a detailed, nuanced portrait of what drove this man into the path of some of the world's most dangerous storms.
  Storm-chasers Carl Young, left, and Tim Samaras.  (AP/Discovery Channel/Marion Cunningham/(DMN file))
  Storm-chasers Carl Young, left, and Tim Samaras.
  (AP/Discovery Channel/Marion Cunningham/(DMN file))

  Hargrove does not shy away from the broader consequences of storm-chasing fame. Tornadoes can suck the asphalt off a road or shred a house into matchsticks. They kill. Samaras was cautious in the field, always looking for escape routes in case a twister unexpectedly shifted direction. But the adrenaline-fueled nature of his work, coupled with the huge reach of reality TV, inevitably led to copycats. An entire class of yahoos now drives into storms with no emergency plan or sense of how to not endanger others.

  For Samaras, the story drew towards its climax in El Reno, Okla., in May 2013. The roads were clogged, the tornado was fierce, and Samaras was in a white Chevy Cobalt with his son and another of his closest colleagues. They caught the storm — and tornado hunting would never be the same again.

  Alexandra Witze, a Colorado-based science journalist, once went storm-chasing along the Iowa-Illinois border. She saw lots of rain and hail but, thankfully, no tornadoes.
  The Man Who Caught the Storm

  The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras
  Brantley Hargrove
  (Simon & Schuster, $26)
  Available April 3
  Plan your life

  Brantley Hargrove will appear at the Dallas Book Festival Saturday, April 7 at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library, 1515 Young Street, Dallas. Details at dallasbookfestival.org.

  He'll also appear at 7 p.m. Monday, April 16 at Interabang Books, 10720 Preston Road, Dallas.

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