Reed Timmer has Timmer has been chasing storms for more than two decades, ever since he intercepted his first tornado in northern Oklahoma as a meteorology student. During that time, Timmer, who typically logs more than 50,000 miles on the road each year, has intercepted countless tornadoes, each of which has helped him expand his knowledge of extreme weather. “We still don’t fully know what happens inside a tornado,” says Edgar O’Neal, a weather journalist who is Timmer’s chasing partner.
Enter the Dominator. This is the third version of Timmer’s custom tornado-fighting vehicle, which he initially unveiled in the late 2000s. The current Dominator has the chassis of an F350 and weighs 10,000 pounds, allowing it to withstand the debris, gorilla-sized hail and 150-mph winds that accompany the most powerful storms. According to Timmer, his “holy grail” is to drive the Dominator within a quarter-mile of a tornado and then fire a sensor-laden rocket directly into the heart of the twister. Timmer has accomplished this once: In May 2019, the rocket tracked the vortex’s pressure drop and frigid air temperature. His team’s hope for next year is to launch dozens of rockets at the same time into the swirling updraft of a tornado’s “inlet notch.” But even if all those rockets fail, the Dominator is packed with sensors of its own to capture valuable scientific data. “That’s the idea,” O’Neal says. “You can launch probes into a tornado, or you can be the probe, and that’s the Dominator.”