Science & Tech

Alberta-based computer scientist Mark Simpson can design anything he puts his mind to. So why has he chosen to chase tornadoes?

Mark Simpson uses special meteorological balloons to launch his sensors into storms to better understand their inner workings. (Photo: Leah Hennel/Can Geo)

Amid the all-American heroes and villains that populate last summer’s hit tornado movie Twisters, an outsider plays a key role. He is a meek, bespectacled British journalist who has come to Tornado Alley in the southern United States to write a story about a storm chaser played by the chiselled actor Glen Powell.

Powell’s character is all swashbuckle and nerve in the face of imminent death. By contrast, the journalist’s stand- out scene is when he stumbles from the backseat of a truck, post-tornado, and vomits. It’s a classic film trope, pitting the plucky American against the faint-hearted Brit.

But while Powell’s character is based on Reed Timmer, a real-life social media personality and arguably the world’s most famous storm chaser, the British character has links to a lesser known member of Timmer’s team. He is British-born, Alberta-based Mark Simpson, a shy, self-employed computer scientist and electronics designer who did what nobody else has ever been able to do: he invented an electronic sensor that measures the thermodynamics inside a tornado in three dimensions. He fired one of them into a ferocious tornado near Lawrence, Kansas, in 2019. The peer-reviewed paper about it came out last year.

A storm builds near Pine Lake, Alta. (Photo: Matt Melnyk)

Teams of scientists have been trying to peer into the inner workings of tornadoes for decades so they can better understand how they form and therefore how to predict them. The ferocious windstorms kill dozens of people a year in the United States and Canada, the top two most tornadic countries in the world. Damages amount to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The stakes are high enough that researchers are trying to figure out whether climate disruption, which is generally increasing severe weather, will make tornadoes more frequent or stronger.

But getting information from inside a tornado is a notoriously difficult task. Much of the current data comes from

mobile radars probing them from outside, from devices planted on the ground in the tornado’s path or from computer and lab simulations. It’s dangerous to get close enough to a tornado to launch something into it. Plus, tornadoes are so violent that they tend to destroy equipment placed inside them. So, despite having access to money from government agencies and university laboratories, other scientists couldn’t work it out.

Simpson did it on his own from his Alberta home. And he did it with no university affiliation, in about a month, from scratch, on the cheap. Each sensor costs $400.

“I mean, he’s just definitely a genius,” says Timmer.

Simpson can not only build beautiful hardware but also write elegant code to process data and images and make the tool intuitive to use. Being good at just one of those tasks is uncommon and valuable.

So who is this guy? And why tornadoes?

Simpson drives thousands of kilometres a year in pursuit of storms. (Photo: Leah Hennel/Can Geo)

Simpson and I are in his much-dented red Ram 1500 truck, racing down an Alberta highway, peering at the prairie sky. The truck is a gadgeteer’s paradise kitted out with instruments — many of which Simpson built or designed — to measure humidity, temperature, dew point, barometric pressure, wind speed, wind direction, lightning strikes, hail, atmospheric gravity waves and even infrasound waves too low for the human ear to detect. Simpson’s brought along a tank of helium, a bunch of his tiny tornado sensors packed in high-density, construction-grade foam and specialized meteorological balloons that can take the sensors more than 21,000 metres into the air. Plus, of course, the usual battery of computers, phones, cameras, drones and other essential modern-day scientific field gear.

This is our second day chasing tornadoes. It’s mid-July, toward the end of what is typically a month-long tornado season in Alberta. We had been waiting for two things: a forecast of two or three days of potential storm activity and for the canola fields to bloom, because storms feed on moisture the plants breathe into the air.

Finally, he texted me: “It’s go time.” I hopped on a one-way flight from Toronto to Calgary, and we chased until long after dark.

A tornado forms near Carstairs, Alta. (Photo: Matt Melnyk)

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.

Simpson's chase truck is kitted out with weather instruments. (Photo: Leah Hennel/Can Geo)

A plot line in Twisters revolves around the crush of amateur tornado chasers who gather, often in gas station parking lots, around the Timmeresque male lead. A theme is that you don’t need a PhD in meteorology to chase storms, just enthusiasm, a smartphone and maybe a YouTube channel to stream your efforts. In one scene, the Timmer character, surrounded by his “hillbilly with a YouTube channel” acolytes, shouts his catchphrase: “If you feel it, chase it!”

That part of the movie, much of which is scientifically fantastical, holds true. Citizen storm chasers have multiplied in the years since the original tornado blockbuster, Twister, came out in 1996. Starring Helen Hunt and the late Bill Paxton, the movie was a terrifying look at the violence of tornadoes and the lengths to which scientists will go to understand them. It charmed the world and got a couple of Oscar nominations.

Its success spawned a spate of other tornado programs, including the reality television series Storm Chasers (2007 to 2011), which stars Timmer (who actually does have a PhD in meteorology). And all that attention, plus the rise of social media and live-streaming and the accessibility of radar images, has spawned even more public interest in chasing. These days, research scientists sometimes have to cope with what they call “chaser convergence,” when so many amateur spotters are following the same storm it can lead to dangerous traffic jams on dodgy back roads.

An infrasound sensor to detect sounds below the range of human hearing. (Photo: Leah Hennel/Can Geo)

Even so, scientists give kudos to the citizen chasers for helping to spread information about tornado sightings. They say some amateurs are also helping to crack the mysteries of tornado science. Two stand out.

One was Tim Samaras, a renegade, pioneering, self-taught American tornado chaser who worked with academic researchers collecting data and publishing papers. In 2003, Samaras and his team put a turtle-shaped probe on the ground in the path of a tornado in South Dakota and collected information about its inner life, a breakthrough. Samaras died chasing a tornado in El Reno, Oklahoma, in 2013.

Another is Simpson. While much of the cutting edge of tornado science right now is focused on trying to understand wind speeds in the bottom 50 metres of a storm, where so much of the damage happens, Simpson’s higher altitude sensor work is still novel, says David Sills, director of the Northern Tornadoes Project at Western University in London, Ont.

“It’s no small feat. A lot of people struggle to see a tornado when they’re chasing, let alone see it and launch something into it,” Sills says. “It’s not like in the movies where there’s twisters all over the place. It’s hard. It’s like a needle-in-a-haystack hard.”

Simpson had to find 12 tornadoes in order to get his sensor inside one, with a window of only a couple of minutes after the launch to get to safety. And he just keeps going. “You’re not going to find too many researchers at universities or government labs willing or able to do that,” Sills says.

It was the original Twister that sparked Simpson’s interest in tornadoes. That, and the fact that in 1997 he left England and arrived on the Canadian Prairies, where intense tornadoes are far more common. Simpson’s interest and expertise grew until, in early 2019, he and Timmer connected.

A close-up of Simpson's tornado sensor. (Photo: Leah Hennel/Can Geo)

Timmer had long felt that a great missing piece of the tornado puzzle is what happens inside it. He’d been trying to launch miniaturized sensors into tornadoes since 2007, working with engineering companies and defence contractors, scratching together money from sponsorships and broadcast deals. No luck. Simpson’s device, which weighs less than a robin, transmitted live, high-precision three-dimensional data every second from within the storm. When they finally recovered the device more than 50 kilometres from the launch site in a church in Leavenworth, they got even more detailed information.

Timmer showed video footage of Simpson’s sensor success to Mark L. Smith, lead writer of Twisters. Smith researched the script in part by spending time with Timmer in 2021 in his bespoke armoured vehicle, Dominator 3, chasing storms. Timmer also regaled Smith with tales about the British-Canadian genius who had cracked one of the toughest technological challenges of meteorology.

When Timmer watched the final cut, he saw Simpson’s personality neatly divided between two characters: the timid British journalist and the smart science guy. “I’m certain Mark inspired one or both of those characters,” he says.

Simpson is holding his tornado sensor, which can withstand wind speeds up to 306 km/h. (Photo: Leah Hennel/Can Geo)

Simpson and I are still on the road. It’s now late afternoon and, after the earlier fizzle, we’re heading to Rocky Mountain House, south of where Environment Canada has issued a severe thunderstorm watch. Reluctant to spare the time to stop at a restaurant, he has brought elegant lunches for us: ham and cheese buns with homemade Dijon mustard, carrot sticks, grapes, plums, a water bottle spiked with mint from his garden. It’s all tidily packed in flip-top containers, almost like the code he packs onto silicon chips.

He’s continues to divide his attention between radar, satellite, forecasts and the sky outside the windshield. It’s all mysterious to me. I look at the sky and see benign mist. He sees living forces of physics at play and can imagine where they might end up. He talks about them in almost human terms. Storms break out. Or they are disorganized. Or they have no capability of rotating. They die.

A tornado touches down near Carstairs, Alta. (Photo: Matt Melnyk)

Simpson feels compelled to figure them out precisely because it’s so fiendishly hard to do. “I just love learning and building things,” he tells me. “When someone tells me something’s impossible, that’s when I generally try to do it.” Then he laughs.

Earlier today, I was talking with Simpson’s mother, Tessa, who lives in Airdrie, Alta., trying to get clues from her about why her son’s brain works this way. A tiny woman nearing 80, she followed him from England a dozen years ago and often goes chasing with him. She loves it. “I think it’s beautiful, a tornado,” she says, adding: “I hope you get one.” Simpson’s chaser colleagues call her “Mark’s badass mom.”

She says that, difficult as it is to explain, her son has always been able to do anything he tried. She shows me a beautifully crafted machine he made sitting on the table next to her television. It alerts her to the arrival of the northern lights, which she likes to watch, even matching the tint of the alert to the colour of the aurora. It’s accurate 97 per cent of the time. Simpson recently developed a device that discovered a previously unknown binary asteroid (two asteroids that orbit each other), for which he earned a citation from the International Astronomy Union. “He’s never actually not been able to do anything,” his mother says, shrugging slightly.

“Getting information from inside a tornado is a notoriously difficult task.”

Simpson’s own conclusion is that his brain may work the way it does because of all the music he’s studied. Before heading to the University of London in London, England, to study computer science, he won a scholarship at age 11 to study piano at the Royal Academy of Music there. His father, Douglas, was an accomplished pianist who studied with a student of Franz Liszt.

The music forced him to live out real-time patterns at speed, always thinking about what was coming. In a way, it was training for both computer coding and tornado chasing. Even now, he sees patterns everywhere. Everything has a mathematical and proportional relationship to everything else. These patterns spread themselves out for him like a map, and he writes them down in his memory.

It’s now almost 6 p.m., and we’re parked at a gas bar in Rocky Mountain House. The relaxed mood in the truck is shifting. Two storms are shaping up nearby, and one is developing hail. “It’s quite a nice one. It could be taller but it’s quite severe,” Simpson tells me, pointing. He’s thinking about how to launch a sensor into it with a balloon. We start driving straight toward it. There’s a blotch of bright green on the radar that means winds are about 100 kilometres an hour within the storm. Simpson has become terribly alert.

A supercell thunderstorm near High River, Alta. Blooming canola can actually fuel thunderstorms through evapotranspiration. (Photo: Matt Melnyk)

At 6:40, the storm develops into a supercell, the possible precursor to a tornado. It’s got what Simpson calls, with grim satisfaction, a “large and decent core.” It’s straight ahead, just to our west, with mammatus clouds, which look like pouchy, pendulous udders, hanging from the underside of its spreading anvil.

Five minutes later, we’re directly under it. We’re driving toward the core, where the rain is heaviest, on tiny back roads, becoming swallowed up in it. My knuckles are white. Lightning is flashing. I’m not sure what our exit route is if the thing ramps up a bit more.

Simpson says his worry right now is that we’ll be struck by lightning, which would kill the truck’s electrical system, stranding us. That hadn’t occurred to me. Six minutes after that, he says: “So, have you ever seen golf-ball sized hail?” And laughs. Of course, hail like that could damage or even break apart the windshield. But that’s not extremely likely, he says.

The core is straight ahead now. The front edge of the storm is yellowing pink. We can make out shafts of hail piercing through the vast clouds. The sky is the colour of crushed blackberries. We’re driving past a bright-yellow canola field, all in bloom. Simpson has put the truck into four-wheel drive and reassures me that he has chains for the wheels if we need them. These gravel and dirt roads can get greasy in such heavy rain. My stomach lurches. I feel like the British journalist in the Twisters movie.

And then, it’s all but over. The moment for launching a balloon has passed. No tornado has appeared. Simpson pulls over to take pictures of the departing storm, noting that his instruments captured 97 lightning strikes. “It’s a good storm,” he says. Then: “I’ve seen better.”

Lightning crackles over Red Deer, Alta. (Photo: Matt Melnyk)

We tootle around for another couple of days on the lookout for a tornado but don’t find one. Awful storms, pounding hail, but no twister. We run into about half a dozen other chasers. Some are involved with Team Dominator Canada, the group for which Simpson is lead scientist and assistant team lead. Most of the more casual chasers are not trying to get close, like Simpson is, or figure out what makes a tornado tick. They view from afar. For one thing, they don’t want the vehicle damage. (One group drives a black Toyota 4Runner with the licence plate: OHAILNO.)

Simpson launches one of his sensors just east of Calgary to take an atmospheric sounding, the measurement of the vertical distribution of things such as pressure, temperature, wind speed and direction that Environment Canada and other meteorologists use to help create weather models. Most of the models, which are readily available on apps and websites, rely on data taken from airplanes and satellites. Simpson’s balloon sounding is both localized and taken from the ground up, meaning it’s apt to be more accurate. He posts it on social media as a reality check against those official models.

We spend hours tracking the balloon and its package through the sky to a field outside Drumheller, then hike a hill to retrieve it. Simpson has written an app to direct us on foot to exactly where the sensor is, guiding us seamlessly through the wildflowers.

The sun beats down on us. The prairies are singing with life. It’s a far cry from the violence and uncertainty of the storms we’ve been chasing. I can see why Simpson does this. He’s identified a puzzle, solved a piece of it, and knows that he, and maybe he alone, can solve more. It’s a mystery that his mind just keeps gnawing at, trying to tease out a way to be the first to gather a few more data points.

Simpson’s goal, and Timmer’s, is to launch multiple sensors into the same tornado, an even more difficult feat than what they’ve already done. Could that lead to information that could save lives, develop early warning systems, lead to more windproof homes? Maybe. Or maybe they will turn their focus to the tornado’s mysterious bot- tom 50 metres instead.

Finally, we’re done. Simpson drops me off and drives away, weathervane churning in the wind. When we check in again earlier this year, he tells me he chased for many more weeks after we parted, far more than he expected, putting in 17,500 kilometres. He came close 20 times but, in the end, didn’t see a tornado. Now, he’s waiting for the canola to bloom so he can start the chase again.

Help us tell Canada’s story

You can support Canadian Geographic in 3 ways:

The research project trying to find every tornado in Canada

Tracking the country’s extreme weather events to answer the question: are storms getting worse?

Science & Tech

Physical distancing requirements to slow the spread of COVID-19 will make it difficult for researchers to visit suspected tornado sites this year, so the team behind the Northern Tornadoes Project is calling on the public to help

6 minutes

Storm clouds are seen over a pump jack rig

Northern Tornadoes Project confirms 77 tornadoes in 2020

Program used community reports and remote sensing to confirm tornadoes

New series features storm chasers tracking Canada’s terrible tornadoes

Most people run away at the first sign of a tornado. But the three stars of CMT’s new series rush full throttle towards the twister, trying to get the best footage.

2 minutes

You may also like

Travel

Three reasons to visit La Paz, Mexico

From snorkelling with whale sharks to savouring fully-loaded Mexican hot dogs, here's why La Paz should be on your list of places to travel next

3 minutes

Travel

Getaways for less! Stretch your winter travel budget with FlightHub

Our top picks for winter travel, all for less than $1,000 return airfare

6 minutes

Home

Into the storm: the Canadian transforming tornado science