- It's like the air just becomes smoke, all of a sudden.
You might walk outside and say, "This doesn't smell like here."
Usually, when I see a tornado form,
it doesn't appear as that perfect funnel.
Instead, I see this little tuft of dirt
being kicked up near the ground.
And eventually, that funnel starts to fill in,
spin faster and faster -- pulling up more dirt --
and it can go from nothing to this perfect cone
or perfect funnel in the course of four or five seconds.
- Oh, my God. - People in the media
see the same exact tornado every single time --
the crisp funnel with the high-contrast background --
because that looks good for newspapers.
That looks good for media.
However, most tornadoes don't look like that.
I've been next to tornadoes that are a mile wide that I can't see
because they're completely enshrouded in rain,
or they're low to the ground,
or there are clouds blocking them.
Afterwards, it oftentimes smells like natural gas.
It might smell like destroyed building materials.
It's a very sobering smell afterwards.
You don't forget that after you're in area
kind of decimated by a tornado.
What a tornado is is a really concentrated area
of very intense spin and rapid upward motion.
So you have this column of air that is ascending upwards
at perhaps 150-plus miles per hour sometimes,
and the air is spiraling inwards at up to 300 miles per hour.
So the tornado is like a microcosm of that
thunderstorm updraft, but on an extremely local level.
So, there are two main ingredients we need to cause
either a tornado or tornado-producing storms.
Oftentimes, we have one of these ingredients,
but not both -- like Florida, for example.
They have tons of thunderstorms.
They have a lot of juice in the atmosphere down there,
but they don't seem to have any tornadoes.
However, we go up to Canada, for example --
they have the wind dynamics,
but it's oftentimes not warm enough -- not juicy enough --
to get storms that would produce tornadoes to begin with.
So, you need that fine overlap, and that overlap oftentimes
comes in the central United States.
The Plains has one month --
all the tornadoes are crammed into that month,
and you can see them better out there.
So those are the tornadoes that typically appear in the media.
- Look at that, boys!
- Places like Alabama and Mississippi,
they have a seven-month stretch
from roughly November through June
where tornadoes are possible,
and they do slowly accumulate them over the course of the year
and oftentimes see more than the Plains.
But because they don't occur in those big events,
we kind of underestimate them down there.
- Like, "O-M-G"!
- We're actually seeing a reduction in tornado weather
over the Central Plains with lesser
in the way of large-scale outbreaks,
but an uptick in tornado activity over the deep South --
so, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee.
And the reason for that, we think,
is that dry air over California and the West --
which is becoming reinforced thanks, in large part,
to warming associated with climate change --
that dry air is pushing the boundary
between dry and moist a little farther eastwards.
And as a result, places that would ordinarily see
tornadoes in the past -- like Oklahoma; like Texas --
that's kind of being shifted a little bit more
towards the deep South and the southeast.
One thing we're noticing, too -- at least qualitatively --
is an increase in tornadoes
during the fringe seasons in the East Coast --
so during the spring or during the fall.
I think it'll be several years before we really have
a concrete idea of how climate change is affecting them.
If you live east of the Rockies,
it's a good idea to have a tornado plan.
On average, we have about ten- to 12 minutes-worth of warning
that they put out ahead of time
and before a tornado touches down.
Sometimes, if it's an obvious signature, we can do more.
Sometimes, they touch down with little to no warning.
- Multi-vortices tornado on the ground!
- I think one of the toughest things with that
is that when the public sees something like that,
it's usually the only time
they're ever going to see something that incredible.
So, oftentimes, they remain completely transfixed.
They're shocked by what they see.
But that's the key point -- they have to get to shelter
right then and there, because if you're close enough
to see that happening, odds are, you're close enough
that the tornado can seriously impact you.
And tornadoes can move 50, 60, sometimes 70 miles per hour.
It's imperative people get below ground --
put as many layers between themselves and the outside world
as they can as soon as the first signs of touchdown occur.