Twistex

UPDATE (March 2017): At the time that Samaras, his son, and his colleague, were crushed to death inside their tornado-chasing car, which was apparently rolled by the force of 200-300 mile an hour winds over a distance of a half mile or so, it was said by numerous news sources that this car had been trapped by a traffic jam caused by looky-loos who wanted to see the tornado and/or people sent out on the roads by a local weather reporter to "escape." So, that apparent fact was part of the underpinning of the original post (below). Later analysis of the situation indicates that there was…

Tim Samaras, his son Paul Samaras and their colleague Carl Young were killed yesterday when their research vehicle was crushed almost beyond recognition by a Tornado they were "chasing" in Oklahoma. If you ever watched Storm Chasers, the show on Discovery Channel (it is on Netflix) you may know of these guys. Tim Samaras's team was "TWISTEX" ... they drove pickup trucks with extremely well engineered systems for deploying "probes" that would collect data from tornadoes passing overhead. Their methodology was to get in and out before the tornado came through, and to the extent that we can…