Imagine standing by your window, watching as dark clouds fill the sky, pouring rain and hail. Suddenly, a twisting column of gray appears, descending from the clouds. At first, it hovers above the ground, but soon it touches down, turning darker as it picks up dirt and debris. If you’re lucky, you find shelter before witnessing the powerful winds lifting animals, cars, and even buildings.
Tornadoes can occur anywhere in the world, but most happen in the United States. The U.S. experiences over a thousand tornadoes each year, with around 80 casualties on average. Some years are worse, like the 2011 Super Outbreak, which was one of the largest and deadliest tornado events, causing $12 billion in damages and 321 deaths.
Tornadoes are difficult to predict due to their random nature. On average, forecasts provide only an 8.4-minute warning. Understanding how tornadoes form is crucial for improving predictions. Most tornadoes start with a supercell, a storm with a rotating updraft. This rotation is caused by wind shear, where wind speed and direction change at different altitudes. This can create a horizontal tube of air that becomes vertical, forming a mesocyclone, which can lead to a tornado.
Supercells are the parent storms of most tornadoes. Near the ground, the mesocyclone narrows, speeding up the rotation and creating a funnel cloud. When this rotation reaches the ground, a tornado forms. In the U.S., warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and cool, dry air from the Rocky Mountains create ideal conditions for tornadoes, especially in areas known as Tornado Alley.
Scientists are still uncovering the exact conditions needed for tornadoes. The NOAA launched a project called Vortex to study tornado formation. Vortex 2, the largest iteration, involved over a hundred scientists analyzing supercell thunderstorms across Tornado Alley. They found that temperature differences at the edges of spinning air play a role, but tornadoes can also form with little temperature difference.
The damage caused by a tornado is assessed using the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which rates tornadoes from EF-0 to EF-5 based on wind speeds and damage. The strongest tornado recorded had wind speeds of 512 kilometers per hour, occurring in Bridge Creek, Oklahoma, in 1999. It was classified as an EF-5, but some scientists believe it should have its own category, EF-6, due to its extreme speed.
The deadliest tornado occurred in Bangladesh in 1989, killing at least 1,300 people. In the U.S., the Tri-State Tornado of 1925 was the deadliest, with 695 deaths. It traveled 350 kilometers across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, destroying 15,000 homes.
Predicting tornadoes is challenging because they are small compared to storms. Meteorologists use Doppler radar to monitor storms and assess tornado risks. However, most tornado warnings turn out to be false alarms. Storm chasers play a crucial role by collecting data from tornadoes to improve understanding and forecasts.
Scientists are developing better detection methods and warning systems, like phased array radar, which scans the sky faster than current systems. They are also working on more accurate prediction models. Although predicting tornadoes days in advance may not be possible, even an hour’s notice could save lives.
Staying informed about severe weather is essential. News aggregator apps like Ground News provide unbiased news coverage, helping you understand current events. Ground News offers features to track news bias and source credibility, ensuring you get accurate information.
Using simple materials like a plastic bottle, water, and dish soap, create a model of a tornado. This hands-on activity will help you visualize how tornadoes form and the role of rotation in their development. Share your model with the class and explain the science behind it.
Analyze weather maps to identify areas where tornadoes are likely to form. Look for regions with warm, moist air meeting cool, dry air. Discuss with your classmates how these conditions contribute to tornado formation and why Tornado Alley is particularly prone to tornadoes.
Conduct a research project on the challenges of predicting tornadoes. Investigate current technologies like Doppler radar and phased array radar. Present your findings on how these technologies work and their effectiveness in providing early warnings.
Study the 2011 Super Outbreak and its impact. Create a presentation detailing the causes, effects, and lessons learned from this event. Discuss how understanding such events can help improve future tornado preparedness and response strategies.
Participate in a role-play activity where you assess tornado damage using the Enhanced Fujita Scale. Work in groups to evaluate hypothetical scenarios and determine the EF rating based on observed damage. This will help you understand how tornado strength is measured.
Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:
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As you stand at your window looking out at a sky filled with dark clouds pouring down sheets of rain and hail, suddenly it happens: a twisting column of gray descends from the clouds. At first, it’s just hanging there, suspended above the land, but it soon reaches down and makes contact with the ground. At the same time, it turns even darker as it picks up dirt and debris. If you’re lucky, you make it to shelter before witnessing the immense swirling winds pulling up animals, cars, and buildings in its wake.
This harsh reality can occur anywhere in the world; however, by a wide margin, most tornadoes happen in the United States. The U.S. is also the only country to regularly experience tornadoes that reach the highest classification of violent, which causes the highest percentage of deaths each year. In the United States, there are over a thousand reported tornadoes annually, resulting in around 80 casualties on average. However, some years are much worse. For example, the 2011 Super Outbreak was the largest, costliest, and one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks ever recorded, taking place in the southern, Midwestern, and Northeastern United States from April 25th to 28th. It resulted in roughly $12 billion in damages and left an estimated 321 people dead.
Tornado deaths are caused when an individual is picked up by the strong winds or struck by large chunks of flying debris. While the death rate is significantly lower than it was in the early 1900s, the seemingly random and spontaneous nature of tornadoes makes them one of the most difficult weather phenomena to predict. Current forecasts of incoming tornadoes only provide an average of an 8.4-minute lead time. In a scenario where not only your possessions are at stake but also the lives of you and your family, every second counts.
How and why do some tornadoes become so destructive? How big can they get, and how might we one day be able to predict them better? For such a well-known phenomenon, we know surprisingly little about how tornadoes actually form. Understanding how they form is crucial for developing better tornado prediction models. Some scientists risk their lives by getting up close and personal with these violent storms to determine exactly what’s happening in and around the tornado.
Most tornadoes begin with a supercell, a storm with a persistent rotating updraft at its core. Supercells form due to a particular combination of winds, known as wind shear, where wind speed and direction differ at different altitudes. When wind at ground level blows in one direction and wind higher in the atmosphere blows in another, it can cause a horizontal tube of air to form. As warm, humid air rises and cool air falls, the horizontal tube of rotating air can be pushed to become a vertical one called a vortex or a mesocyclone, which can have a diameter of 5 to 20 kilometers. At this point, the whole storm starts rotating, and the supercell is born.
This type of storm is the parent of most tornadoes. Near the ground, the mesocyclone can be narrowed by the strong updraft. This process, called vortex stretching, speeds up the circulation, creating a funnel cloud. Then, the downdraft brings the rotation down to the ground, and a tornado is born. Low-pressure systems in the U.S. pull warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and cool, dry air aloft from the Rocky Mountains or the high desert in the southwest, creating consistent wind shear. The states that fall between these regions are in an ideal location for severe tornadoes to form.
However, exactly what the right conditions are for tornadoes to form is still a bit of a mystery. In an effort to answer the many questions remaining about tornado formation, the NOAA launched a research project in 1995 called the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment, or Vortex. The largest iteration, Vortex 2, took place in 2009 and included over a hundred scientists who used cutting-edge equipment to analyze weather measurements taken around supercell thunderstorms across 10,000 miles of the Southern and Central U.S., an area dubbed Tornado Alley. Over the span of one month, they collected data from 11 supercell storms, including one supercell tornado.
The results indicated that tornado formation is related to temperature differences at the edges of the spinning air, but that might not always be the case. Mathematical models and real-life observations have demonstrated that tornadoes can arise with very little temperature difference. Clearly, there’s a lot more to uncover about exactly what makes a tornado form. How they dissipate is not much clearer either; scientists are still debating the details. Generally, a tornado stops when it loses its source of instability, like heat or moisture, or its vorticity. One way this could happen is by encountering a cold flow of wind from a rainstorm called an outflow.
The damage caused by a tornado is assessed after it has ended. Experts examine and tally up the damage, looking at what types of buildings were affected and how badly they suffered. They then use the Enhanced Fujita Scale to assign a rating from zero to five, which also estimates wind speeds ranging from 100 to over 320 kilometers per hour. Assessing the damage is often the only way scientists can estimate how strong a tornado was, as it’s rare that they can take a direct wind speed measurement.
Some tornadoes have had their wind speeds directly measured. The tornado with the highest wind speed began in Bridge Creek, Oklahoma, on May 3rd, 1999, during a massive tornado outbreak involving over 70 tornadoes. This particular EF-4/EF-5 tornado traveled across heavily populated areas in Oklahoma, with wind speeds topping 512 kilometers per hour, completely obliterating over 200 homes in about one and a half hours and killing 36 people. It was classified as an EF-5 because the EF-5 category has no upper limit, but its wind speeds were so fast that some scientists think it should have fallen into its own new category, an EF-6.
The problem with creating an EF-6 category is that the vast majority of struck structures are simply gone at the EF-5 rating. Besides the rare tornado, like the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado, that has its wind speed directly measured, the rating comes from the destruction it leaves behind. Complete and total obliteration looks the same whether the wind was 350 kilometers per hour or 550 kilometers per hour. Scientists believe that theoretically, the fastest tornado possible on Earth would be 611 kilometers per hour. The Bridge Creek-Moore tornado was not far off, but while it was devastating, it was not even close to the deadliest.
On April 26, 1989, a single tornado in Bangladesh took at least 1,300 lives and left 80,000 homeless. It was estimated to be an EF-4 tornado with wind speeds of 338 to 418 kilometers per hour. The devastation was so complete that except for some skeletons of trees, there were no signs that any standing structures had ever existed. The deadliest tornado in U.S. history was the Tri-State Tornado on March 18, 1925, which resulted in a death toll of 695 people—almost twice as many as the 2011 Super Outbreak, which consisted of 300 separate tornadoes. The Tri-State Tornado’s name comes from its journey through Southern Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, totaling 350 kilometers. This also made it the tornado with the longest path, taking about three and a half hours. During this time, it destroyed 15,000 homes, earning it a ranking of EF-5.
Neither the Tri-State nor the Bridge Creek tornadoes were the biggest in history. The widest ever recorded reached an enormous width of 4.2 kilometers, occurring around El Reno, Oklahoma, on May 31, 2013, and lasting about 40 minutes. Luckily, it remained mainly in rural areas and was rated EF-3, so while winds reached 484 kilometers per hour, its damage was limited. Wide tornadoes aren’t usually the deadliest; however, this one resulted in the deaths of eight individuals, three of whom were the first storm chasers ever to be killed in a tornado. These events are a chilling reminder of how ruthless nature can be. For anyone living in areas where tornadoes are frequent, all they can hope for is a fair warning to get to safety.
Currently, meteorologists can identify weather conditions that could result in a severe storm days in advance, but determining exactly when or where a tornado will form is much more difficult. A lot of that difficulty is due to the relatively small scale of a tornado. While storms can cover large areas, even multiple states, tornadoes are usually less than a kilometer wide. Once a storm forms, predicting a tornado becomes much easier. Using Doppler radar systems, meteorologists can watch a storm and provide a risk assessment for a certain area, such as a 20% chance of a tornado over a specific distance.
Most often, tornado warnings made by the National Weather Service turn out to be false alarms, happening up to 80% of the time. Of course, it’s always better to be safe than sorry, especially when you only have a few minutes to prepare when a tornado does form. While most people would run from a tornado, it’s a storm chaser’s job to get in front of it. They set up scientific equipment along what they hope will be its path to take important measurements as the tornado travels over it.
As we’ve discussed, there are still many unknowns about how and why tornadoes form, but we know much more than we used to, thanks to these incredibly brave individuals, many of whom are meteorologists. One of the storm chasers who lost his life in the El Reno tornado was Tim Samaras, who was extremely passionate about his work. He once said that a ground-based measurement taken from within a tornado is especially crucial because it provides data about the lowest 10 meters of a tornado, where houses, vehicles, and people are. Other scientists have agreed that the rapidly changing conditions low to the ground may control a tornado’s formation. This data could help scientists better understand tornadoes, improve forecasts, and design structures that can withstand intense winds.
However, creating a technical instrument that can withstand these winds is no easy task. Scientists had once given up on it until May 7, 2002, when Tim Samaras deployed a probe of his own design that survived a direct hit from an EF-3 tornado while recording changes in pressure, wind speed, direction, air temperature, and humidity. With this device, he and his team collected video and data from inside several tornadoes, providing the scientific community with invaluable information.
Collecting this data is just one piece of the puzzle. Scientists are still developing better detection methods and warning systems, including new types of radar technology, such as phased array radar, which can scan the entire sky in less than one minute—five times faster than current radar systems. Scientists are also building better forecasts and prediction models that use current weather and radar data to simulate what the atmosphere will look like in the future. To make them more accurate, scientists are trying to increase their resolution because tornadoes are small compared to thunderstorms, and what’s happening inside a tornado—changes in temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind—occurs on a molecular level.
While a model of every molecule involved in a storm may not be possible right now, we may one day have the computing capacity to do so. Even if we are never able to predict a tornado days ahead of time, gaining just an hour’s notice could save countless lives.
To get up-to-date information on significant storm events, almost everyone relies on the news. We’ve all anxiously tracked thunderstorms coming in to ruin our plans or checked reports of how much damage a recent storm caused and what the government’s plans are for aid and reconstruction. We’ve also felt sympathy for storm reporters getting blasted by snow or clinging on for dear life as hurricane-force winds push them around. When it comes to storm information, we often assume the news will give it to us straight. However, in today’s world of sensationalism and competition for clicks, it’s hard to know what’s being exaggerated and what the simple facts are.
With hundreds of news sources out there, it can be frustrating to sift through all the noise. This is why a good news aggregator app like Ground News is so helpful. It’s an app I use every morning to understand the news in a quick, simple, unbiased way. Ground News is a website and app developed by a former NASA engineer on a mission to provide readers with an easy, data-driven, objective way to read the news. Every story comes with a quick visual breakdown of the political bias, factuality, and ownership of the sources reporting, all backed by ratings from three independent news monitoring organizations.
You can quickly swipe through the different headlines that various news outlets give to the same story. Sometimes the differences are subtle; other times, they are not. You can also see which news outlets are choosing to ignore or underreport stories that are being widely reported elsewhere. For example, if you look up topics like tornadoes or climate change on Ground News, you can see that most stories receive far more left-leaning coverage.
While I expected the climate change bias, tornado coverage bias was surprising. For instance, a story about how the Democratic governor of Kentucky’s efforts to help storm-torn areas might hurt the GOP advantage in rural areas was reported on by 18 different outlets and had a 44% left lean in coverage and a 0% right-leaning coverage. I know I might get comments about bias, but the truth is that readers from any political leaning can identify media bias and check source credibility with Ground News.
There’s even a web browser extension that shows the breakdown of how news outlets from across the political spectrum report on the same story. This helps you immediately notice certain bias trends, which is both helpful and fascinating. Seeing the different choices of words and headlines from various organizations while also seeing their bias flagged adds another layer of interest to reading the daily news.
So, if you’re looking for a better way to stay informed about current events around the world, check out Ground News by visiting ground.news/realscience. The link is in the description. You can try it free or subscribe to access all the features and support transparent, independent news. Ground News is also offering all Real Science viewers a special 30% discount on their Vantage subscription, which includes access to a feature called My News Bias—a dashboard for your news diet. Sign up to see how your reading habits change over the next week, what your top sources are, and whether you’re engaging with diverse perspectives on your favorite topics. This offer is only available at ground.news/realscience or by clicking the link in the video description.
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This version removes any potentially sensitive or inappropriate content while maintaining the informative nature of the original transcript.
Tornadoes – Violently rotating columns of air extending from a thunderstorm to the ground. – Example sentence: Tornadoes can cause significant destruction when they touch down in populated areas.
Supercells – Large, rotating thunderstorms with a well-defined circulation. – Example sentence: Supercells are capable of producing severe weather, including tornadoes and large hail.
Formation – The process of developing or being created, especially in the context of weather phenomena. – Example sentence: The formation of a tornado often begins with a supercell thunderstorm.
Meteorologists – Scientists who study the atmosphere and weather patterns to understand and predict weather conditions. – Example sentence: Meteorologists use advanced tools to track storm systems and provide weather forecasts.
Prediction – The act of forecasting future weather conditions based on data and models. – Example sentence: Accurate prediction of severe weather can help communities prepare and stay safe.
Winds – Natural movements of air, often playing a crucial role in weather patterns and storm development. – Example sentence: Strong winds can accompany thunderstorms and cause damage to structures and trees.
Damage – Harm or destruction caused by natural events like storms or tornadoes. – Example sentence: The tornado left a trail of damage, uprooting trees and destroying homes.
Research – The systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources to establish facts and reach new conclusions, especially in science. – Example sentence: Ongoing research in meteorology helps improve our understanding of severe weather events.
Technology – The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, such as weather forecasting tools and instruments. – Example sentence: Advances in technology have made it possible to predict storms with greater accuracy.
Alerts – Warnings issued to inform people about severe weather conditions and potential hazards. – Example sentence: Weather alerts are crucial for notifying the public about approaching storms and ensuring safety.
