A Trip Into Tornado Alley With America’s Most Obsessive Storm Chaser

On a clear morning in late May, Reed Timmer began the day at home in Lexington, Okla., studying the latest update from the National Weather Service’s storm-prediction center. The map showed a “moderate” chance of tornado activity in the region later that day, and Timmer buzzed with nervous excitement.

But he faced a tough choice. The forecast showed two areas, hundreds of miles apart, where tornado outbreaks were most likely. To the north, an incoming area of low pressure pointed to potential activity near the Kansas border. But Timmer was more intrigued by what he saw in Texas, where strengthening low-altitude winds and a trough of moisture were set to coalesce in the afternoon.

By lunchtime, Timmer was speeding south. If a tornado touched down, he planned on driving directly into it.

Timmer, 44, is the nation’s most famous storm chaser. With millions of followers on social media, he livestreams his relentless pursuit of violent weather, gleefully careering into the path of deadly storms. (He is often accompanied by a handful of collaborators, including another storm chaser, Edgar ONeal.) A scientist and a showman, a thrill seeker and an early-warning system, Timmer is the speeding, screaming, occasionally manure-splattered face of extreme weather in America.

He is an inspiration for one of the lead characters in the new film “Twisters,” which hit theaters on July 19, amid one of the busiest tornado years in history. And unlike many storm chasers, Timmer is also a credentialed meteorologist who remains driven by an obsessive desire to know as much about tornadoes as is humanly possible.

As the day went on, Timmer drove through the Chickasaw Nation reservation and across the border into Texas. The sky darkened as bands of thunderstorms began rolling in from the west. Watching the radar, he zigzagged past cattle ranches and oil wells, trying to stay ahead of the weather. Just southwest of Wichita Falls, he sped through a downpour and a hailstorm, phenomena that often precede and follow tornadoes.

Timmer enrolled at the University of Oklahoma to study meteorology in 1998. A month into his freshman year, he went storm chasing, and saw his first tornado. The next spring, he had to shelter under a freeway overpass while chasing the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado, which killed more than 30 people and leveled parts of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. “I got obsessed with being up close from that moment on,” he says.

He went on to begin his Ph.D. studies, but the allure of storm chasing waylaid his academic career. In 2008, he starred in the second season of “Storm Chasers,” a reality television show on Discovery. Over four seasons, Timmer grew more comfortable onscreen, and more ambitious in his chases. By 2009, he was roving the plains in the first of his specialized “Dominator” vehicles, a modified Chevy Tahoe outfitted in armor and tricked out with sensors.

Three years ago, Timmer got a call from Hollywood. Universal Pictures and Warner Brothers were making an update to “Twister,” the 1996 blockbuster starring Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. The writer, Mark L. Smith, wanted to spend time with Timmer, learning what it was like to chase.

Smith joined Timmer — and Timmer’s elderly, infirm Yorkshire terrier, Gizmo — on the road for a few days in 2021, and used what he saw to help construct the character in the film played by Glen Powell. “I built everything around a version of him, a Texas version of Reed,” Smith says. “This guy that just was a little bit nuts but exciting and fun.”

“Reed is infamous,” says Bill Gallus, a professor of meteorology at Iowa State University and an occasional storm chaser. “He’s somewhat crazy. He seems to not have a fear of tornadoes.”

As he approaches a storm, Timmer begins to bounce around in his seat, craning his neck to get the best angle and looking into the clouds for clues about its next move. All the while, he is steering, filming out the window with his phone, tracking the radar, watching the map and looking out at the sky, often while tearing down dirt roads at 80 miles per hour.

What he is driving, more often than not, is far from a normal vehicle. The Dominator 3 is a seven-ton customized Ford F-350 clad in bulletproof armor, outfitted with scientific instruments and shaped to resemble a giant armadillo. When it rolls into a gas station, curious onlookers swarm to take pictures; when other storm chasers see it in the field, they know they are in the right place.

With each chase, Timmer is hoping to learn a little more. “Our goal is just to collect as many data points as possible from inside the tornado at ground level,” he says. He is particularly keen to record wind speeds and pressure levels. Such information might help forecasters predict storms more accurately, and ultimately save lives, he says.

In recent years he has been pursuing an even more audacious feat. He wants to measure the complete thermodynamics of a tornado in three dimensions, by deploying miniaturized sensors inside a funnel cloud. He has achieved this feat just once, in 2019, when he launched a rocket into a tornado in Lawrence, Kan. When the rocket entered the storm, it deployed a “custom lightweight, miniaturized, and trackable meteorological probe,” which recorded data as winds carried it more than 31 miles. Timmer and his collaborators published the data they collected in a peer-reviewed journal last year.

Timmer insists that chasing tornadoes is safe, though others’ experience suggests a different conclusion. In 2013, while he was pursuing the El Reno tornado in Oklahoma, four other chasers died in the storm. Two years ago, three University of Oklahoma students were killed in a traffic accident on their way back from chasing a storm. (The National Weather Service said it “does not condone or encourage storm chasing.”)

Scientists say there is no evidence yet that climate change is leading to more tornadoes. Instead, more chaotic weather patterns seem to be diffusing tornado activity, spreading it farther around the country and the calendar year, and creating more clustered outbreaks. So far this year, more than 1,000 tornadoes have hit the United States, the seventh-most since records started being kept in 1950, according to the National Weather Service. Timmer has spotted 75 of them, the most he has ever seen in one year.

On May 21, Timmer witnessed an enormous tornado with multiple vortexes in Greenfield, Iowa. As he filmed from the ground and the air, with a drone, the twister reached speeds of 300 miles per hour, shredding enormous wind turbines and ultimately killing five people.

Then came the tornado in Windthorst. A few days later, he was racing through Texas again, when he hit a deer. The deer died, and the Dominator 3 was badly damaged and had to be sent to the shop. Two days later, Timmer was chasing in his Subaru when the engine blew out. With a towering stovepipe tornado in front of him, he got out of the car and watched as the sky dropped down low, pulling dirt and debris into the heavens.

As the wind roared and cows ran for their lives, the meteorologist in him studied the storm’s structure, admiring the occlusion process. Time slowed down as he stood there, stationary, imagining what more he might be able to learn if he was inside the tornado, doing his best to mentally plot its complex dynamics, wishing he had probes aloft in it at that very second.