The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado by Holly Bailey Page B

destroyed a nearby mobile home. It was a close call, but even then they were not able to deploy their machine in time.
    Over the years, Bluestein and his researchers would try again, but in the end it was simply too dangerous. A team from the Severe Storms Lab tried for a few more years, and in the spring of 1985 they almost succeeded. But a weak tornado near Ardmore blew the machine over, and it was retired.
    TOTO, for all of its failings, eventually made Bluestein and his colleagues famous beyond the science world. The device was the inspiration for the fictional machine “Dorothy” featured in the 1996 movie
Twister,
which made storm chasers like Bluestein (who was a technical consultant on the film) famous. The film prompted a surge in enrollment at OU, where suddenly everyone wanted to be a storm chaser. At the same time, tornadoes became a burgeoning tourist industry in Oklahoma, as guides led visitors from all over the world on storm-chasing expeditions across the state in the springtime.
    Bluestein had mixed feelings about this sudden surge of interest. On the one hand, he loved the fact that the public had begun to engage in the important science of storms—which meant more funding for projects to better understand the genesis of tornadoes and to create better warning systems. But he was unnerved by tourists and amateur storm chasers. Suddenly the empty country roads in Oklahoma were as packed as the Massachusetts Turnpike at rush hour—and he suspected many of the weekend chasers didn’t appreciate how truly dangerous it could be to put yourself in the path of a tornado.
    Bluestein wasn’t a daredevil, a fact that sometimes irked his young students, who were hungry to get as close as possible to the storms they chased. He’d had one close call in 1991, when he got within a mile of the tornado and suddenly it turned on him. He was so close he saw the vortex blow a house clean off its foundation right in front of him—sending a bolt of fear through his heart. He survived the storm and came out of it with valuable information, but he vowed never to get that close to a tornado again. He had documented a tornado with winds of more than 280 miles per hour—then categorized as an F5. Nobody had ever seen one with winds that strong before.
    Over the years, Bluestein hadn’t slowed down in his never-ending pursuit of the storm. Every spring he and his students would travel as much as 10,000 miles, driving their mobile Doppler radar across Oklahoma and the central plains chasing ever-elusive tornadoes. He’d noticed that the storms seemed to be getting bigger and deadlier—though he wasn’t sure, since records had been virtually nonexistent until the late 1950s. Who knew what their ancestors had seen? Especially in Oklahoma, which had been a wide-open empty space for hundreds of years until the land run of 1889 put it on the path to statehood. While the Native Americans who lived there had amassed wisdom about how to pacify the demon clouds, as they thought of them, their sacred rituals had never been shared outside their tribes.
    In 1999 Bluestein and his team were tracking the epic tornado that wiped out a large swath of Moore when they recorded winds of 302 miles per hour—the fastest wind speed ever recorded near the surface of the earth. Bluestein hadn’t recorded another tornado that strong since, but plenty of others were almost equally devastating. He began to notice odd things about the storms—how one year would produce dozens of strong tornadoes, followed by a year when there were almost none. But he couldn’t explain why this was. For all the time and money put into studies and equipment, scientists still knew remarkably little about what made tornadoes form.
    Like others, he wondered about the effects of global warming. Could an increase in the earth’s temperature be responsible for creating ever-deadlier storms, especially in Oklahoma, where the warming of the tropical air coming off the Gulf