Meatwagon to Mobile Doppler: The Chase Car as Atmospheric Science Research Technology

Historians of science have often been interested in the places where science is done, especially the distinction between laboratory and field science. In recent decades, historians have pushed back against earlier scholarship that established a clear delineation between lab and field, suggesting that the boundaries between lab and field are not only porous but sometimes nonexistent. Studies have explored how a field site can mimic a laboratory, and a laboratory can itself serve as a field site for ethnographic research. Some of the more interesting recent developments in this scholarship examine the forms of transportation that connect laboratory and field, or even suggest that vessels themselves can serve as makeshift laboratory spaces. This paper, focused on the role of vehicles in severe storms field research in the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, builds on this latter concept.

From the earliest experiments in tornado interception in the 1960s and 1970s, simple consumer vehicles—cars and passenger vans—played a crucial role as transportation technology to enable atmospheric scientists to reach the traveling field sites of developing severe storms. As interception continued to take a central place in severe storms research, scientific storm chasers outfitted their vehicles with methods for gathering increasingly sophisticated data. Chase cars evolved from straightforward methods of transportation, carrying researchers into the field, to hosts for increasingly lab-like forms of data gathering. These began with simple instruments for measuring atmospheric data and continued with experimental objects such as the University of Oklahoma’s TOtable Tornado Observatory (ToTO) and the development of mobile Doppler. The National Severe Storms Laboratory’s 1994-1995 VORTEX project depended on a fleet of vehicles, each outfitted with technology for gathering data for an unprecedented coordinated severe storms research project. Similarly outfitted vehicles continue to bring new lab-like technology for data gathering and analysis into the field each spring. This paper takes a close look at the chase car as an evolving—and overlooked—form of technology in severe storms research.