TWISTEX

TWISTEX (an acronym for Tactical Weather-Instrumented Sampling in/near Tornadoes EXperiment) is a tornado research experiment that was founded and headed up by Tim Samaras of Bennett, Colorado.

The project normally runs from mid-April through the end of June with a domain that covers the Great Plains and portions of the Midwestern United States. The project is normally at full strength for most of May and June with four vehicles, all equipped with roof-mounted mobile mesonet weather stations. One of the vehicles transports an array of in situ thermodynamic and video probes. Due to graduate and upper-division undergraduate student participant availability, a reduced vehicle compliment consisting of the in situ probe deployment truck and one support mesonet station vehicle is used in the first few weeks of the project.

The objectives of this research are to better understand tornado generation, maintenance and decay processes and to gain insight and knowledge of the seldom sampled near-surface internal tornado environment. Progress on these research fronts is aimed toward increasing tornado warning lead time while the internal tornado near-surface sampling provides essential ground truth data for structural engineering analysis of the interaction of tornadic winds with homes and buildings.

TWISTEX is one of the featured teams in seasons 3, 4 and 5 of Storm Chasers on the Discovery Channel. The group has also been featured on National Geographic Channel's "Disaster Labs".

On May 31, 2013, Tim Samaras, his 24-year-old son Paul Samaras, and 45-year-old California native Carl Young lost their lives in the El Reno tornado, a record wide multiple-vortex tornado. They were unable to escape along gravel roads as the funnel rapidly expanded to envelop them. Their Chevrolet Cobalt was caught by a subvortex, and Paul and Carl were ejected from the car. Tim was buckled in the passenger's seat, and was killed as the car was thrown approximately half a mile by the storm. Dan Robinson of St. Louis was a few hundred yards from them, but successfully escaped with minor injuries. Hinton resident Richard Henderson, who decided to follow the twister, lost his life in that same area. He snapped a picture of the storm from his cellular phone before it struck him. Several other storm chasers, including The Weather Channel's Mike Bettes, were also caught in the same sub-vortex but escaped with only minor injuries. Bettes and the Tornado Hunt crew were lifted up by the wedge tornado in their sport utility vehicle. That storm threw them two hundred yards off U.S. Route 81. The SUV was destroyed afterwards. Five other people who were not involved with storm chasing also lost their lives in this tornado.

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Wikipedia