Dominator 3 Tornado Tank ULTIMATE Tour

the inside of a tornado only five research papers in history have data from in here and that's why we built this monster and everything about this vehicle is custom built the way that it looks the way it operates the instruments on it everything is custom built by us 5 4 3 this is real life twister this is the most capable storm chasing vehicle on the planet this is the Dominator 3 and as you can see there's plenty of space for sponsors to study the inside of tornadoes you can't set up a lab and expect one to come through so the best way is to build a lab on Wheels and park the gear in the path but if the powerful winds get underneath a vehicle this can happen a flip so that's why we've got this skirt on the bottom here this skirting has been added across the entire base of the outer armor and that prevents wind from getting underneath the vehicle but right here you can see that there's some space where the wind can get underneath this is the height that we drive down the highway but we get in the path of a tornado we have a system that lowers the vehicle and drive spikes into the ground and we're going to show you that outside in a second it's this method and the rocket system will also show you that have the highest success rate so up here check this out this is the victim of the real problem of a tornado hold on hold on guys flying debris so this is heavyduty plastic and this was shattered and SNA napped off by a juniper tree inside that last tornado we intercepted so that leads us to the armor system on the Dominator 3 this is 3/4 in steel and this is what the shell of the Dominator 3 is made of and we've covered that with this rough surface right here this is a Kevlar based polyethylene basically a bulletproof vest for the Dominator 3 and anything just bounces right off okay and over here protecting the lights is a quarter inch polycarbonate plastic that's also bulletproof and the Dominator 3 has a double window system we have an inner and an outer one for dual protection from flying debris so this is a polycarbonate windshield and look closely and you can see all these little dents those are from Pebbles moving at speeds of over 150 mph inside of the tornado now I'm going to show you how tough this stuff is [Laughter] that's tough Dominator tough tornadoes do some weird things and recording these events helps to verify and guide other researchers computer models and that's why we want to maximize our chances of getting great footage so that's why we've redesigned the entire back end of Dominator 3 and coated every square inch of it with polycarbonate plastic so that you could see up at the tornado you could see all angles of the tornado in progress and capture that very valuable high resolution footage we can also pop the back open and there's plenty of room for our scientific gear including our Rockets which I'm going to show you shortly also plenty of room for adult diapers underwear but under here these are the muscle and cardio systems of the Dominator 3 when we talk about raising and lowering the vehicle this is what makes that happen listen to him purr and if you go from the air compressors and follow these lines up here they go up to our door system but these doors weigh 800 lb with all the armor so if you look up here we've got this complex valve system to support that weight and to help you push them open from the inside yeah that's our lift system that helps lift the heavy weight of the door and these gwing doors aren't just for looks so when we're close to a tornado we need to look at the sky but also when you're up close to a tornado you're very near the hail core and you could easily get a softball-sized Hailstone coming through the sky and hitting you in the head so these doors raise up and they give us added protection from overhead while the doors open you can see the original truck door here and then you can see all the armor we've added on the outside very thick another advantage of the gall wi door system on the Dominator 3 is it fixes a big problem that we found out with the Dominator one and two so imagine you're out chasing a storm with Team Dominator and you're out looking at a tornado and you have to hop in the Dominator fast all right we got to go guys we got to go oh no look at that we can't go you actually can't shut the front door until the back one is closed it's because of how all the heavy armor fixed together so the people in the back might be out panicking maybe they're going to the bathroom but this is a big problem right here but now it's fixed on Dominator 3 with the gall wi lift system pinch it off we got to go and the last thing before we jump in is I'm going to show you the engine underneath all this squeak squeak goes the Dominator 3 so the whole reinforced hood of the Dominator 3 comes forward like this giving us a look at the powerful engine inside this is a 6.7 L turbo diesel engine and this is what drives the 10,000lb Dominator 3 at highway speeds of over 70 mph and we can also accelerate very fast if we have to run from a tornado that's too powerful to intercept this power stroke engine gives us the pickme up to get out of a hard spot and believe it or not this thing gets about 16 to 17 mes per gallon on highway speeds and in case we need a pit stop we get a flat tire we have these protective flaps that we can lift up and access the wheel heavy duty tires of course all right let's step inside the the Dominator 3 and show you how we get our data yep eye contact yep okay yep 3 2 One [Music] release well welcome inside the cockpit of Dominator 3 good to have you kind of a standard F350 look from the inside see some cup holders you can put your Mountain Dew or energy drink right in here but you can definitely see a couple things are added we've got this peak of the armor the peak of the armor on the hood is designed to funnel the wind up and over the top of the vehicle so that you don't get all this debris just slamming into the windshield and this is where we're putting our updated live streaming panel because yes we stream live our tornado intercepts and storm chases as it happens that left that left looking in the back you can see that we removed the bent seats of the Ford F350 and replaced it with three additional Captain's chairs we pretty much live inside this vehicle Comfort is important as well you guys ready to storm Chase so our research is divided into two modes intercepts and Rocket deployments intercepts are measurements at the ground level of a tornado with the Dominator we actually started with super heavy ground probes that we would drop in the path of a tornado but after having some tornadoes Bend away and missed we decided to turn the whole vehicle into one big probe that that way we can adjust forward and backwards with the tornado right up until the last second so when we get in the path of the tornado and it's bearing down on us I press number one to drop the vehicle flush to the ground bingo bango bongo so now we're flush to the ground but we want to make sure we're not thrown so we hit this second switch the spikes go into the ground about 6 or 8 in and that anchors us to the ground when the tornado arrives then we go to the outer switch so we're lower to the ground the spikes are in the windows are up now we're in full-blown intercept mode intercepting a tornado is one of the most intense experiences of your life the winds feel really powerful so powerful that even the Dominator is bouncing up and down they make this really low Roar almost like a freight train or a really loud waterfall like Niagara Falls uh the dramatic pressure fall makes it feel like a lot of weight is on the shoulder your eard drums are about to burst out and it happens really fast suddenly the sun is coming out you see the Blue Sky you see the tornado moving off in the distance and you realize that you survived it and then suddenly you're overwhelmed with happiness you realize that the Dominator 3 got its job done and most importantly we know that we collected some incredible data from inside of the tornado but as rare and valuable as that data is it's from the ground level just like those four other research papers the Holy Grail now is actually getting data above ground level in the heart of the tornado it's only been done once and that's where our rocket research comes in team Dominator has spent over 10 years funding different methods trying to get probes inside but we kept running into one problem a wall of powerful sinking air surrounding the tornadoes it would knock our probes out of the sky right before getting inside but in 2019 we finally settled on a method that would punch through the sinking air and here is the team Dominator rocket our rocket has two main parts the rocket itself and this right here this is the team Dominator Skyfall sensor custom made by our science lead Mark Simpson we're going to fit this sensor inside the nose cone we're going to attach a parachute on it and we're going to get ready for launch we also have a parachute inside of the rocket it's all ready to go so you've got the sensor in the nose cone we're going to stuff the nose cone on and now we're ready for launch to launch a rocket we need to get in the perfect place of the storm right in the inflow Notch of the supercell that's where all the wind is flowing in toward the tornado and we need to be at least a quarter mile away from the vortex there we go Rockets attached so this stop right here is what keeps the rocket in place we've got the blast plate that's needed to to give the propulsion necessary to launch and we have these long rods too because that stabilizes the flight path early on and we have the two rocket engines now I'm just positioning it to connect the igniters to the engine that's what provides just a little bit of fire in there to ignite the rocket engine going to make sure positives on one side and negatives on the other and they don't touch this is very intense when you know you have an F4 tornado bearing down on you it's going to stay just to our West Mark am I connected we now have continuity I know that the red and the black are connected properly because the continuity lights are on can you close your hatch you got to re stand up and reach out all right we are launching in 10 nine 8 7 6 5 4 3 [Music] okay so now the rocket is flying toward the tornado it punches through the pocket of sinking air around the vortex and once inside the nose cone pops off and the parachute deploys and it's carried around inside the vortex just like the movie Twister and we've got to get after the rocket so as the probe is getting carried around inside of the tornado we're immediately getting live data like this we've got pressure relative humidity we've got IMU acceleration we've got our GPS position and we even have the data of exactly how the sensor is tumbling around in 3D but right now we're only getting live data at one time per second but we actually have to recover the physical sensor to get the super high resolution data but for the Lawrence to Linville ef4 tornado the tornado carried it over 26 miles away from where we launched it Mark how is the rocket in the tornado right now um I believe so how high is it 10,000 10,000 10,000 ft no no 10,000 M yeah 30,000 ft guys and there it is the yellow there it is right there the nose cone made it that bright yellow color so you can see it easily see the nose cone and the parachute and that is holding the sensor with the valuable data inside so here it is the moment of Glory here when you retrieve the nose cone this contains the high resolution data from Inside the Tornado the pressure fall the wind speed all that 3D information inside and it's all contained on the sensor in the nose cone so we're going to head back to the team Dominator headquarters and show you the data right now so here's the actual data the GPS positions of the rocket launch that we had into the lywood ef4 tornado these are the first ever data points measured above ground inside of a tornado core flow in history and so each of these are data points measured at a rate of five times a second the red is the actual rocket and so was going toward the tornado and then the parachute popped off with the nose cone and the miniaturized sensor and then it got entrained into the tornado so if we look from the top you can see that it did nearly two revolutions around the inside of the tornado and at the same time it was measuring a pressure fall of over a 100 mbars that's how you know it was inside the core flow of the tornado and this probe then rode the mes Cyclone up to 30,000 ft before falling to the ground near lenworth Kansas over 26 mil from the launch site and we wouldn't have found the probe if we didn't post a picture of it that's how we found the probe over 26 miles away from the launch point and thank you to Matthew and Jeremy for keeping their eyes open and finding that sensor in the lawn of a church in lenworth Kansas we're going to be doing another video and take a deeper dive into this first ever data collected above ground inside of a tornado we're also going to talk about our future research plans launching dozens of rockets into the tornado at the same time dozens of sensors that way we can measure gradients and pressure gradients and temperature and really get a three-dimensional understanding of the tornado storm season is about to get started in a big way we're going to have several months of severe weather and storm chasing so be sure to tune in to team Dominator live dominate that like button please subscribe to our Channel all we do is Storm Chase we want to do it live we want to do science we want to increase awareness for severe weather never stop chasing

Channel: Reed Timmer

Views: 2,104,212

Keywords: stormchasing, live weather, live weather channel, severe weather, reed timmer, storm, storm chasers, stormchasers, weather forecasting, video, videos, news, Global news, World news, Direct weather, dominator 3, twisters, twister, dorothy, ryan hall, caught on camera, storm chasing, tornado warning

Id: yfLi7ysSdGk

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024