TWISTEX
Tactical Weather Instrumented Sampling in/near Tornadoes EXperiment
Founded by engineer Tim Samaras to deploy his HITPR "turtle" probes and mesonet vehicles directly in tornadoes' paths, combining hard engineering with field science rather than theory alone.
Sean Casey
Filmmaker & TIV builder
An IMAX director who built the TIV1 and TIV2 to get large-format film cameras closer to tornadoes than had been done before, aiming for footage rather than pure data collection.
Reed Timmer
Meteorologist, "extreme" storm chaser
A University of Oklahoma-trained meteorologist (PhD 2015) known for driving the Dominator series directly into tornadoes, launching rocket probes into vortices, and years of high-profile intercepts across Tornado Alley.
Freddy McKinney
Storm chaser & content creator
A modern livestream-era chaser and CEO of Storm Society, known for broadcasting chases directly to a large online audience and for stopping mid-chase to help storm victims.
Joshua Wurman
Atmospheric scientist
Creator of the Doppler on Wheels (DOW), a truck-mounted mobile radar that revolutionized close-range tornado research by mapping wind fields in real time, and a lead scientist on the VORTEX2 field project.