What Stands in a Storm by Kim Cross Page A

the mercy of the winds inside.
    This science was not for sissies. No storm was to be avoided, no matter how large or violent it appeared. During the summers of 1946 and 1947, pilots participating in the study logged seventy flight-hours inside seventy-six thunderstorms. Planes were struck by lightning twenty-one times. But the pilots pulled off 1,362 storm penetrations without a single accident.
    As the planes sliced through each storm, their instruments measured turbulence, updrafts, and downdrafts. Equipped with radars, the P-61C Black Widows also had transponders so they could be tracked from the ground as they passed through the storm. The cockpit instrument panels were continuously photographed, and evidence of pilots “flying” their planes in ways that might compromise the data meant that data would be thrown out.
    While the pilots were getting buffeted around in the thunderheads, a two-mile grid of surface observation stations scanned the skies; weather balloons measured temperature, dew point, and wind speeds at different altitudes; ground radars tracked and monitored the thunderheads and guided the pilots through them; and radar-wind stations measured wind speeds. The result was a sort of meteorological MRI, a constellation of data that painted a vivid picture of the bowels of the thunderstorm.
    Scientists at the University of Chicago analyzed the data by hand over the next three years—their findings on the life cycle of a thunderstorm underpin our understanding of severe-weather phenomena today.
    A few years after the Thunderstorm Project, the first tornado forecast in the history of meteorology was made. It was also the first accurate one and was issued on Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City on March 25, 1948. Until that day, tornadoes were considered to be an “act of God” (a phrase that still haunts today’s homeowners insurance policies) and forecasting them was not regularly done.
    Five days earlier, a large tornado—we don’t know the rating because the scales used today did not yet exist—had struck the base onlyeight minutes after it was spotted by a nearby airport. The funnel was lit up from within by lightning and stormed through the air force base, flinging aircraft, shattering the control tower windows, andcausing $10 million in damage (nearly $100 million in today’s dollars).
    The day after that storm, the base commander, General F. S. Borum, ordered two officers at the base weather post, Major Ernest J. Fawbush and Captain Robert C. Miller, to investigate thunderstorms to try to predict which are likely to produce tornadoes—and to give people enough advance warning to prepare or escape. The officers spent the next few days feverishly poring over weather maps, looking for patterns in the conditions that precede storms.
    On the morning of March 25, Miller and Fawbush noticed conditions disturbingly similar to those leading up to that week’s earlier tornado. The same surface lows hovered over the west-central plains. The dryline again lurked west of Tinker, inviting a warm, humid air to flow north from the Gulf and smother the base with a mass of muggy air, the jet fuel of thunderstorms. The atmosphere was unstable, with blobs of warm air rising rapidly through cool air above, like great invisible hot-air balloons. High up, the “balloons” encountered strong winds blowing in different directions, which caused them to spin like tops. The jet stream screaming through the upper atmosphere further enhanced the wind shear. Recognizing this pattern, the officers briefed the general that they thought the likelihood of tornadoes was high enough to justify a warning. The word “tornado” in a public broadcast was still avoided, but the general announced the beginning of a new era with his terse order:
    â€œDo it!”
    At 3:00 p.m. that day, Miller and Fawbush issued their warning to the base, sending military personnel into