Today looks even scarier. Predictive radar and weather models are showing the possibility of big storms, maybe even supercells with rotating, upward-moving winds that could kick off a tornado. “It could be quite a reasonable day,” Simpson says nonchalantly, his British accent snipping off the ends of the words. Meaning: spinning winds powerful enough to rip trees from the ground, flip cars, peel the roofs off buildings and even kill could be, even now, mustering their forces nearby in wildly unpredictable ways.
His plan is for us to get as close to those winds as possible and get one of his sensors into them, preferably from behind the storm. His successful effort in Kansas involved launching a rocket a mere 30 metres from a tornado whose winds peaked at 306 kilometres per hour. But here in Canada, fire regulations mean he has to use a helium-filled balloon rather than a rocket to carry the sensor into the heart of the action. He points to a string of clouds along the Rocky Mountains west of Calgary. The base is good, he says, making silent calculations about how much wind energy, lift, moisture and instability the clouds have. Those are all ingredients a tornado needs. As he drives, his head pivots from the sky to Radar-Scope, an app that broadcasts real-time radar data and storm information, back and forth, back and forth. He’s hoping to see a discrete radar blob with purple in the middle and maybe the distinctive hook shape that can indicate the air within and around the storm is starting to swirl.
We park at a gas station. The blistering midday heat punches us full in the body as we get out of the truck. Simpson, with neatly trimmed grey hair and wire-rimmed glasses, dressed in his uniform of baggy black sweatpants, a black T-shirt bearing Timmer’s Team Dominator logo and hiking boots, sets up his tripod and aims his camera at the clouds forming this side of the mountains, a way to track their strategy.
Twelve minutes later, it’s all over. He shows me the time-lapse images. The storm tried to grow and then fell apart. It’s gone.
He turns back to RadarScope. Something is brewing in Saskatchewan, a day’s drive away. He sighs. “I always wish I was somewhere else,” he says. But then he brightens. It’s early in the day, and a monster storm might still be on the horizon.