El Reno 2013: Why Scientists Still Can't Explain This Tornado

[00:00:00]June 1st, 2013.

[00:00:02]>> A stormchaser is speeding away from the largest tornado ever recorded. His dash cam is running.

[00:00:08]>> In the rear view mirror, he sees a white car. Then the rain closes in.

[00:00:13]>> The car disappears.

[00:00:15]>> What was supposed to be a routine deployment mission turned into the deadliest day in stormchasing history.

[00:00:21]However, just 11 days before, the same team had been sitting in traffic while an EF5 tornado destroyed an entire city.

[00:00:29]That failure was still fresh. That failure was exactly why they were out here again. And that failure was about to cost them everything. On May 20th, 2013, a tornado tore through Moore, Oklahoma. It was on the ground for 40 minutes. It was over a mile wide. Its winds exceeded 200 mph.

[00:00:49]It moved through the southern suburbs of one of the most densely populated areas in the state, and it did not slow down.

[00:00:56]Plaza Towers Elementary School took a direct hit.

[00:01:00]>> The building collapsed on top of the children sheltering inside. I don't know how to explain it, how to describe it.

[00:01:07]>> This is terrible. This is war zone terrible. This school is completely gone from the sky.

[00:01:14]>> They're going to start pulling these tiny victims out of the rubble here shortly.

[00:01:18]While every other vehicle on those roads was trying to get away, one team was trying to get closer. Engineer and storm researcher Tim Samaris had spent 20 years building instruments that could survive inside a tornado. His mission that day was to place them directly in the storm's path and measure what no one had ever measured before. Pressure, wind speed, the behavior of the vortex from the inside.

[00:01:44]But they never got close. The suburbs of Moore turned into gridlock. Thousands of residents evacuating at once. The Twistex team sat motionless for hours while the EF5 moved away. Tim's instruments, his famous turtles, stayed in the trunk the entire time. For Tim, it wasn't just a missed opportunity. It was personal. He didn't just chase tornadoes.

[00:02:09]>> He built the tools to understand them from the inside.

[00:02:13]>> Tim Samaris grew up in Colorado. He never finished college. He had no university position, no research grant, no institution behind him. What he had was an engineer's brain that couldn't leave a problem alone and an obsession with the most violent storms on Earth that had started when he was a kid watching television.

[00:02:35]You know, I've been doing this for 20 years. I enjoy the hell out of it. I really do. Out here watching the great clouds, the great storms. You never know exactly what you're going to find.

[00:02:50]>> In the 1990s, he started chasing tornadoes across tornado alley. Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas. Not for footage, not for the rush, for data.

[00:03:03]Each expedition taught him something new about how to survive a storm and how to make his instruments work inside one.

[00:03:10]In the early 2000s, he founded Twistex, tactical weather instrumented sampling in tornadoes experiment. The goal was to place scientific probes directly in a tornado's path. Not beside it, not near it, inside it.

[00:03:25]>> The instrument he built for that became known as the turtle. Low to the ground, heavily armored, anchored with steel spikes, it could withstand winds over 250 mph, it transmitted pressure, temperature, and wind data in real time, every fraction of a second. He built the first one in his garage. On June 24th, 2003, near Manchester, South Dakota, he placed a turtle directly in the path of an F4 tornado. When the storm passed over it, the sensors recorded a pressure drop that stunned the meteorological community, one of the largest ever documented inside a tornado. The Guinness Book of World Records certified the measurement. A self-taught engineer with no academic credentials had just produced one of the most significant tornado measurements in history. But it wasn't the only breakthrough. In 2009, near Aurora, Nebraska, cameras placed beside a turtle captured something scientists had rarely seen from ground level. The main circulation passing directly overhead, while smaller subvortices spun violently around it.

[00:04:33]>> Those tiny rotating columns inside the larger tornado, each one capable of winds more extreme than the parent vortex itself, had almost never been documented this close before. The footage became a landmark in tornado research. He also built a high-speed camera he called the Kahuna. 10,000 frames per second, 82 lenses. It could photograph a single lightning bolt at one microsecond intervals and show scientists exactly how the discharge formed stepby step from cloud to ground.

[00:05:05]He was an engineer, an inventor, a scientist, and a stormchaser all at once. Building tools that didn't exist, collecting data no one had collected.

[00:05:16]doing it from the back of a pickup truck on empty Oklahoma planes. But over time, it stopped being just about the science.

[00:05:25]It became about his son.

[00:05:27]Paul Samaris was 24 years old in the spring of 2013.

[00:05:32]He had grown up watching his father work. The probes, the maps, the long drives, the close calls. He joined the Twistex team as a teenager. By 2013, he was a gifted photographer with a genuine instinct for the field. Out in the dark, empty plains, his father had taught him how to place probes, how to read the sky, how to get closer than anyone else dared. And Paul had learned fast.

[00:05:58]>> Everyone okay?

[00:05:59]>> A month before Elno, he posted to his friends on Facebook. Okay, so let's say the possibility of doing a documentary on my dad with stormchasing is in the air. What have you always wondered about? Stormchasing or not?

[00:06:11]>> Wow.

[00:06:12]>> He wanted to show people who his father really was.

[00:06:16]On May 31st, 2013, Paul was in the passenger seat. The morning of May 31st was the kind that makes forecasters go quiet, hot, humid, unstable.

[00:06:29]The atmosphere across central Oklahoma was primed in a way that experienced meteorologists recognized immediately.

[00:06:36]The Storm Prediction Center had issued a high-risk outlook, their most serious category. The conditions were not just favorable for tornadoes. They were favorable for violent long track extreme tornadoes.

[00:06:52]Tim noticed that morning. He posted on Twitter, "Storms now initiating south of Watanga along Triple Point. Dangerous day ahead for Okay. Stay weather savvy.

[00:07:04]It's >> almost stationary now." He already knew what was building.

[00:07:07]>> The Twistex team, Tim, Paul, and meteorologist Carl Young, converged near El Reno, about 30 m west of Oklahoma City. At 6:03 p.m., the first funnel touched the ground. It didn't look like a tornado. No clean cone, no clear silhouette against the sky. What emerged from the base of the storm was a chaotic churning mass, a wall of rain and debris that slowly swallowed the horizon.

[00:07:38]Even experienced chasers felt uneasy watching it form.

[00:07:43]You can kind of see the dome and everything going up in there. If anything's on the ground, I believe it's right in there. But it's going to be rain wrapped. This is the most dangerous tornado you can get because you can't see it coming at all.

[00:07:59]From the very beginning, the Elno tornado wasn't a funnel. It was something else entirely. It was a multi vortex tornado.

[00:08:09]Inside the main circulation, dozens of smaller columns called subvortices were constantly forming, intensifying, and vanishing, rotating around the center like a swarm. Each one could carry winds more extreme than the parent vortex itself. When one weakened and another formed nearby, the zone of peak winds effectively jumped to a completely different location inside the storm. The most dangerous part of this tornado wasn't at the center. It was wherever the subvortices happened to be at that exact second and no one outside the rain curtain could see them. Moving dewy, it's a large multivortex.

[00:08:47]The main circulation is probably about a half mile wide, and there's individual vortices coming down that are more intense.

[00:08:54]>> The Twist X team was working northeast of the tornado's starting point, coordinating over radio, watching radar returns on a laptop mounted to the dashboard, searching for a position to deploy probes. Every decision carried enormous risk. A sudden shift in the tornado's direction could put them directly in its path within seconds. And this storm was shifting constantly.

[00:09:17]Around 6:15 p.m., the tornado abruptly changed course. Instead of moving eastsoutheast as the model suggested, it turned north, then northeast. An unusual and dangerous deviation that caught multiple chasers offguard. The Twistex team adjusted their position. They recalculated. They believed they had maintained a safe distance from the main circulation. They had no idea what was about to happen.

[00:09:44]Around 6:20 p.m., the Elno tornado stopped being a large storm. It became a monster. Within minutes, the circulation exploded outward, expanding to a width of 2.6 miles. The widest tornado ever recorded in the United States, possibly the widest tornado ever recorded anywhere on Earth. And it happened so fast that the radar returns couldn't keep up. By the time the data processed, the outer edge of the circulation had already moved.

[00:10:15]>> But the greatest danger was invisible.

[00:10:17]>> A massive rain curtain had completely wrapped around the tornado, hiding its true boundaries from the outside. The Twistex team believed they were still at a safe distance. In reality, their white Chevrolet Cobalt was already inside the outer windfield of the expanding circulation. The trap had already closed.

[00:10:37]At 6:23 p.m., as the tornado crossed near Highway 81, the situation had become irreversible.

[00:10:44]Inside the rain curtain, radar was measuring wind speeds approaching 300 mph in localized zones, shifting unpredictably as subvortices formed and collapsed within the main circulation.

[00:10:56]Carl Young said quietly, "There's no rain. It's getting eerily quiet." Tim responded, "Actually, I think we're in a bad spot.

[00:11:07]At that same moment, another stormchaser fleeing the tornado in the opposite direction had his dash cam running. In his rear view mirror, the footage captured a white vehicle on a parallel road, small, stationary, already surrounded by the gray wall of the expanding storm. Then the curtain closed.

[00:11:27]Tim Samaris's radio signal vanished at 6:24 p.m. There were no final screams, no desperate calls over the radio. The signal simply stopped.

[00:11:40]The subvortex that struck the Twistex vehicle carried winds near 300 mph.

[00:11:46]The impact was instantaneous.

[00:11:49]The Chevrolet Cobalt was lifted into the air, thrown, and rolled multiple times across an open field. The metal twisted apart. Equipment was torn from the vehicle. The car came to rest more than 2,000 ft from where it had been struck.

[00:12:05]When rescue teams finally reached what remained, the scene was almost impossible to examine. Tim Samaris was found still strapped into his seat at the location where the car had come to rest. Paul and Carl were found far away.

[00:12:21]Carl about half a mile to the west. Paul approximately a quarter mile to the east.

[00:12:27]Canadian County under sheriff Chris West described the wreckage to the Washington Post.

[00:12:33]>> It looks like it had gone through a trash compactor.

[00:12:36]>> The car was probably about 60 to 70% of its normal size because it had been pushed and mauled and compacted as it was tumbling down the road.

[00:12:45]Tim Samaris, Paul Samaris, and Carl Young were killed instantly. Even the most cautious storm researcher in history had no chance against this tornado. It broke every rule scientists thought they understood about positioning, movement, and distance. It wasn't that Tim made a mistake. It was that the storm did something no tornado had ever done before. And it did it in seconds invisibly from behind a wall of rain. Later, investigators recovered cameras and data recorders from the wreckage of the Twistex vehicle. Some of the instruments had kept running until the moment of impact. The data they contained, the final recordings of the subvortex structure, the pressure readings, the wind measurements captured in the last moments before the signal went dark, became the team's final scientific legacy. It gave researchers the clearest direct measurements ever taken inside an extreme multivortex circulation.

[00:13:43]It changed how meteorologists modeled subvortex behavior. It influenced new safety guidelines for stormchasers that are still being used today.

[00:13:53]Kathy Samaris lost her husband and her son on the same afternoon.

[00:13:58]As you can understand, we're still adjusting to our new reality without him. Yet, the data that Tim and Paul and Carl collected right up until the end became a foundation for research that continues to improve tornado warning systems across the country. The measurements recorded by their cameras and probes are still cited in scientific papers, still used in meteorological studies, still saving lives.

[00:14:24]>> It was the widest tornado ever recorded in the United States. For Tim Samaris, it became the final chapter of a lifetime spent chasing storms. A tornado that took his life, but left behind knowledge that continues to save others.

[00:14:40]It started with the Wizard of Oz. He was a kid in his room in Colorado. His mother asked him to come watch a musical. He didn't want to, but she sat him down anyway, and the next thing he knew, there was this big black tornado on the screen, roying and enormous and alive, and he couldn't look away. I was mesmerized by this thing, and ever since then, I've just set on a lifelong quest to go watch tornadoes.

[00:15:06]He spent 20 years building the tools to get inside them. On May 31st, 2013, he finally