Tim Samaras

This was the last message of Tim Samaras who only a few hours later, along with his son, Paul, and meteorologist Carl Young, died after a tornado generating winds of up to 175 mph picked up their car and threw it somersaulting through the air, landing half a mile away. The storm chasing team were monitoring the tornado, deploying atmospheric pressure probes to test infrasound tornado sensors when their car was hit. The trio were heard screaming ‘we’re going to die, we’re going to die’ on highway-patrol radio moments before they were killed by the widest tornado ever recorded, measuring in at 2.6 miles. Samaras was the founder of a field research team called Tactical Weather Instrumented Sampling in Tornadoes EXperiment (TWISTEX) which sought to better understand tornadoes. His work was funded in large part by the National Geographic Society (NGS) awarding him 18 grants for his field work. Samaras designed and built his own weather instruments, known as probes, and deployed them in the…