Unexplainable - The tornado problem

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

2023 has been a record-setting year for tornadoes, and these storms came with barely any warning. So to better understand tornadoes, scientists might need to confront more of these storms head-on. This episode originally ran on July 12, 2021. For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to view show transcripts and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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2020 has been one of the stormiest years on record. Over 400 tornadoes hit the U.S. in just the first three months of this year, which has never happened before. And these have been some pretty serious storms. Close to 70 people have been killed in tornadoes this year, which is already three times more than all of 2022. And the main reason tornadoes keep having this kind of impact is because scientists just don't know how to predict when and where. they'll actually touch down. We talked about this tornado problem in an episode a while back, and because we're still right in the middle of a tornado season,

we wanted to share it with you again. It's all about exactly how tornadoes form, why we're still struggling to predict them, and why one of the best ways to get better at this might be to go storm chasing. Tornadoes are just, like, kind of metal. Like, they're loud, they're destructive. There's no moving,

tornado. It's the force that you have to deal with. You know, like, when you're in a concert and it's just like way too loud, like, that's the image I have of a tornado. They're like, they're there to punch you in the gut and then they run away. I guess we should intro ourselves real quick. I'm Noam Hassenfeld. You're Brian Resnick. This is unexplainable. Yeah. And you've been reporting on tornadoes. What is the big unexplainable about tornadoes? We just don't know. when they're going to show up. Like, tornadoes, they are awesome if you get to watch them from afar. Right.

When they come for you, it's horrifying and quite deadly. And they don't come with a lot of warning. Okay. So recently, I talked to this guy. He lives in East Nashville, Tennessee. His name's Moe O'Dwani. It was March 3rd. It was actually my mom's birthday.

I don't always remember it. It's midnight, and he wakes up. The night before we haven't really heard anything about, like, really strong weather, just the normal typical Tennessee weather. And his phone is going crazy. When I woke up, it was freak me out. I was like, what is that? But it was loud enough that I woke up.

He looks down at it and says, oh, there's a tornado warning. You should seek shelter. So I look out the window and I don't really see anything. Mo has gotten these before and they haven't always preceded a tornado. Everybody thought, oh, it's probably going to be nothing. So then I was like, you know what? Let's just be safe. I'll just go down to the garage.

There's a few other residents there. And at first it seems quiet and they don't really think anything's going to happen. And then it comes. You can feel the wind kind of change. You know, they're inside this garage so they don't see it, but they hear it. The whole building started to shake. It sounded like a freight train. It's one of the loudest things he's ever heard in his life, and he's really scared.

I was holding onto the bike rail in our garage, and we were just like praying and yelling and, like, fear and death. We're just like, this is it. You know, this is how I'm going out. The next day he goes out into his community, and he sees how terrible it really was. There's so much damage, and it was like a bomb went off in East Nashville. Everything was destroyed. 25 people died in those storms,

and he remembers just thinking. Usually sirens would go off, but we just never heard any sirens. He just wonders, like, wow, if I didn't get this alert on my phone, would I have been in greater danger? My Apple warning, basically at that point could have saved my life. You know, something worse could have happened. But even the phone alert, he says it only came between seven, maybe ten minutes before the tornado actually hit. He wonders like, oh, wow, if my phone wasn't with me, you know, what if it was in the other room?

Like, what would have happened? Is this just like how it goes? I mean, only getting seven minutes in the middle of the night to get down to safety? Is that normal? Sadly, yes. is not an exceptional or rare story. Forecasters are just really bad at this. And when these warnings do come,

they often don't proceed a tornado. 70, 80% of warnings don't actually come before a tornado. They're false alarms. What? So you're saying people usually only have like seven minutes to get to safety, and then like three quarters of the time there's no tornado, even when we do get the warning? Yeah.

this is where we are. How is that possible? How do we not understand this better? The heart of it is actually kind of simple. Okay. Tornadoes come from thunderstorms. But meteorologists, they can look at two thunderstorms. These thunderstorms will look identical.

But one will produce a tornado, and the other one won't. And they really don't know what makes the difference. Huh. So what do scientists know about how tornadoes form? Yeah, I was wondering that, too. I talked to Robin Tanamachi. She's a meteorologist at Purdue University in Indiana, and she knows everything there is to know about tornadoes.

I teach mainly atmospheric science, radar meteorology, and severe storms meteorology. She's been fascinating by them her whole life. She told me this story of when she was a little girl, there was this tornado captured on the news by the news helicopter. We're about three quarters of a mile from the actual touchdown at this time. This is really spectacular. And what did I see on the screen, but it was this gorgeous helical tornado, and it was live.

I'm going to have to leave this area here. The debris is drifting my way here. And I believe at this point, the helicopter pilot is realizing, whoa, we've got a live tornado on our hands, and so they're maneuvering around it, trying to keep a safe distance from it. Right now the tornado is located over a wooded area, and it is ripping entire pine trees into the air, thousands of feet. She remembers just like thinking, I can't get enough of that.

She couldn't look away. My thought was just, what is it that's making this happen? You know, what is it in the environment that's necessitating that this thing exists and what makes it so powerful? I really wanted answers to those questions. I know you would ask me some questions here. Unfortunately, I've been watching the tornado instead of where I'm gone. Yeah, lots of questions.

What's Robin learned so far? Well, obviously, she hasn't gotten to like that holy great. of being able to predict and know everything about the formation of a single tornado. But on the bigger picture, she does know where they come from. Okay. Mainly, they come from here. They come from the U.S. There are definitely hot spots all over the world,

but the United States by far gets the most of them. Why are there so many tornadoes in the U.S.? So like I said, tornadoes come from thunderstorms. A thunderstorm you can think of as an organism that ingests and eats warm moist air. And warm, moist air, we got that in spades. That comes from the Gulf of Mexico. And that's moving north from the Gulf. This tide of moist air that just keeps sloshing northward from the Gulf of Mexico

over the southern tier of states. And then it hits two dry streams. So one, we got dry air from the Rockies. And two, we've got dry air coming off the Mexican plateau. So that warm, moist air from the Gulf, it meets those other two streams and gets pulled up into them, but those two streams are moving in different directions, so all that air begins to twist and condense and form clouds. It will start to rotate just on its own.

Spontaneously, that air will be torqued and twisted. In my head, I'm envisioning, you know, like, Looney Tunes when the three cartoon characters all, like, run into a big brawl and it kind of like spirals into a cycling. Yeah, something like that. I'm imagining something more of like a wizard summoning these air streams that converge into a cauldron and create these vortexes. But we have different brains. How does Robin think about it?

It's like a big barber pole in the middle where the air is rising, but it's also twisting as it goes up. This is the heart of a supercell. Supercell? Yeah. Supercells are these mega thunderstorms that spawned tornadoes.

They rotate. So they're kind of like these mini hurricanes. And the big question is like, how do you take this big kind of lumbering rotation in the sky from these supercells, and how does that get concentrated down into this vortex that actually extends from the cloud all the way to the ground? Okay, so we know the U.S. has all these supercells, these big twisting thunderstorms, and those sort of give birth to tornadoes. So do scientists have any right ideas here? Like,

what sets this process off? Well, before they even get to there, it's more like they don't see what sets it off. That process is probably happening on timescales of just a few seconds or less. All this happens so fast. Weather radar, like our number one tool for observing storms, it just can't see it. Why can't radar see tornadoes? Well, one part of the problem is, like, it basically picks up on moisture, rain. And you can infer things from rain, like wind speed, like you determine how fast that

rain is moving. But it's like this incomplete picture of a storm. The other problem with radar is physically radar is this dish that spins. And so every time it spins, it like takes an observation of the thing that it's observing, like a storm. But that takes a few moments for it to spin. You can have a big lazy vortex in one scan, and by the time the radar swings around again, you've got a tornado. The effect is kind of like if you were watching a dancer under a strobe light. The dancer being the storm and the strobe light being like the radar.

that can only capture it in certain moments. So the dancer starts dancing, she's spinning, and you get a slice of it, and then the dish rotates a bit, and it sees a bit, and then it sees a bit, and then it misses a bit. We're scanning it too slowly to see this very rapid process that's happening. Whatever causes the tornado to spawn, it often happens when that dancer is in the dark. You're saying that whatever happens to jumpstart this tornado,

It can happen so fast that it could happen in the dark of the strobe light, like in that moment when the radar dish has its back turned? Yeah. Researchers are so in the dark, like, they're not always sure if, like, the tornado forms from the storm cloud down or from the surface of the earth up, or if, like, kind of both things happen at the same time, and then they connect in this explosive way. It's just the basic idea here is, like, what we can't see, we can't predict.

A lot of times this process is either invisible, or opaque? It's like a magician's sleight of hand trick. Like, again, like, imagine two thunderstorms that look identical and one produces a tornado. Well, the one that's producing a tornado is, like, performing a trick that we just can't see. And that's

really why tornado warnings are only sent out when a tornado is seemingly detected. Our current paradigm for warning for tornadoes is something called worn on detection, meaning either it's indicated by radar or somebody in the field

has phoned in and reported it. So the tornado has been detected. You issue a warning. Wait, but I thought you said there were a lot of false alarms. Like the majority of the time it's sent out, it's a false alarm. So how could it be a false alarm if they detect the tornado and then alert people? Oh, it's because often when a tornado is indicated by radar, it's not a real tornado. It's just a, so it's a false detection.

And it's a false detection for all the reasons why I said radar isn't that great. it just gets it wrong. It just can't see everything that's happening. And these false alarms, like, it's not just a meteorological problem. It's a psychological problem, too. You know, like the boy who cried wolf syndrome, if you issue too many tornado warnings, people start to not trust them as much.

We need to bring that false alarm rate down so that when we do issue a tornado warning, we're extremely confident people are actually going to take action. So if scientists are already struggling to predict tornadoes, and then they're sort of training people to react to tornado alerts in exactly the wrong. with this boy who cried wolf syndrome. I mean, how do you solve the tornado problem?

So, for one, Robin's really pushing for just better, faster radar that can scan areas more quickly, and maybe then it can pick up on more clues to just better see what's happening in these storms and to see that moment of tornado formation. Like a faster strobe light. Yeah, yeah, a faster strobe light. But really what meteorologists want is like better prediction, better, like, artificial intelligence that can just look at a storm and model it in a computer and then press fast forward and see what will happen. If they can do that, then they can warn on forecast and say, like,

30 minutes from now, we've run the computer models and this storm is going to create a tornado, and you should get out of the way. Yeah, we'd love it if people could have us up to 30 minutes to an hour. I mean, that's where you make a completely different set of decisions. And I assume to get a better AI system, you just got to input. tons and tons of tornadoes all over the country, right? Yeah, and a big challenge here is that tornadoes are so varied. They come in all these shapes and sizes. From very skinny funnels that are only a couple hundred feet wide

all the way up to two and a half miles wide, I believe, was the widest one on record. They seem to be very sensitive to local environmental conditions. So what forms a tornado in one area might not form it in another, maybe just like the presence of trees changes the equation. and tornadoes behave differently in different parts of the country. That huge spectrum makes studying tornadoes really cool, but it also makes studying them really hard.

Yeah, and if you need to get a bunch more tornadoes to input into a new system to figure out how to predict tornadoes, how do you find those tornadoes if we don't know how to predict tornadoes? Yeah, yeah. That's a funny conundrum here. We need more data from the tornadoes themselves, but we don't know when they're going to show up. We need to be prepared to show up when they do, because to get that data, we solve this in the most badass way possible.

We have to go storm chasing. Storm chasing. After the break. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in and your own security channel at London Heathrow, you can glide from your car to their clubhouse. a destination in its own right in 10 minutes or less. On board, you can treat yourself to your own private suite to stretch out in

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or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going, start your search at autotrater.ca, Canada's car marketplace. Unexplainable. We're back. Hey, Brian. Hey. So you've been talking about tornadoes, how scientists still can't really predict when they're going to happen.

And before the break, you said that ultimately we just need a lot more data here, right? Like more scientists studying more tornadoes? Hell yeah. You know, it's always interesting when the sirens come out. The normal public goes down to the basement and the scientists go to the roofs. So this is Jeff Weber. He's an atmospheric scientist. He's stood on a few rooftops.

He's chased a few storms. He actually chased one recently with his 12-year-old son. Admittedly, I plan to plant. the seed, but he is really into it. And after seeing his first tornado last week, he can't get enough. He wants to just keep doing it. So... Oh, my God. What happened on this day?

Well, we're in the house. Tornadals were not forecast to develop anywhere nearest for this day. But a tornado warning went off on my phone. As an atmospheric guy, I have about five weather apps, and my phone started blowing up with this tornado warning. I'm like, a tornado warning. That doesn't seem right.

So I tell my son to run out into the backyard and see if he can see it. We did take some video, and five seconds later, I hear him shrieking at the top of his voice. I see it. I see it. I do too. So we all run out, take pictures from the backyard, and I'm like, hey, buddy, you know, this is pretty cool. He goes, we got to go. We got to chase it. Let's go. And so we ran to the truck, and as we were driving over the top of the hill, we could see the whole layout of the storm. We could see the tornado from the top of the cloud deck all the way to the surface of the ground.

We could see the hail shaft. We could see the heavy rain. We can see the shelf cloud rotating above the tornado. Oh, my God. By the time we got up close to it, it was spectacular. We could see the rotation. We could see the dirt being dug up from the ground. It was just an incredible event.

My heart's pumping is listening to this. It is awe-inducing. It is truly awesome. It is, my mouth is like open as I'm stirring at this thing spinning. It's amazing. It's unreal. What was it like to share that with you? your son? It was one of the highlights of my life. To be chasing a tornado and to see my son so

excited about it, I think I have a future atmospheric scientist on my hands. So to start simply here, why is chasing tornadoes so important? Why can't we study them more remotely? Well, the most important things for a tornado to form is temperature, humidity, wind direction, and speed. But we need them at the surface, we need them at the upper atmosphere, and we need them at levels throughout the entire atmosphere. And so to get that complete data set all around the tornado at all the different levels is very difficult. Why don't we have this now? Is it just like our typical weather radar doesn't take on all this information? It's difficult to get this complete data set because tornadoes don't stay on the ground for a long period of time, and we don't know in advance

where they're going to show up. So if you want to do a contrast with hurricanes, for example, they take days, if not weeks, to cross the Atlantic. And we have the luxury of that time to fly planes through the eyewall of that hurricane and get those measurements. With a tornado, we don't have that luxury of time. They might be on the ground for as little as a few minutes.

And so to be able to marshal all of those instrumentations and planes or sensors, it's very difficult. So if we did have all the right equipment in place and at the right time and we caught a perfect tornado, would that be enough? Heavens, no. We need dozens, if not hundreds. They're kind of like snowflakes. No two tornadoes are exactly alike. For example, of 100 tornadoes, you get 98 of them that spin clockwise, but you're going to get a couple of them that even spin counterclockwise. And we have no idea why. I think as we get greater technology, in particular with drones, either on the ground or in the air, it will give us a greater capacity to collect these datasets without putting humans in Harb's way. And so I'm hopeful that over the next decade or two that we'll have more complete data sets so that not only can we look at one data set of the tornado wire form,

but we can look at nuances and subtleties and differences on why one tornado formed different than another one. And that's what we can unravel the mystery. Why are you confident that it's just a problem of more data? Could it also be the case that these storms are just so chaotic, so sensitive to very slight variations in geography or place or conditions where they're just very hard to predict and we might not ever get much better at this problem? Yeah, I appreciate that perspective. I'm a firm believer, though, that science can solve a lot of these problems if they have the proper data sets to analyze it. We know what we're dealing with. And if we can close the box, so to speak, around the tornado, we should be able to explain what's going on.

We have a very good understanding of thermodynamics and instability, but we just don't know quite how they're interacting with each other at these finite scales that a tornado is operating in. You're saying that our atmosphere is knowable, like things that we can measure. We just need finer and finer grained resolution. Exactly. There's no new physics being brought about by a tornado. The atmosphere is very well understood. The laws of physics are very well understood. We just need to see at these smaller scales how they interact to create the tornado.

I love how a lot of this boils down to, well, to better understand tornadoes, we need to keep chasing them, right? Is that what I'm hearing here? Most definitely. Just photographs from the public can be incredibly helpful because we're still at that point where photographs can gain insight into the structure of the tornado. Do you, I don't know if we should like be telling people on a podcast to like take photos of tornadoes. Only if they're trained and know what you're doing. They are very dangerous, but if you approach them from the backside, that's the smart approach. They should be going away from you, I imagine.

You're right. You should be chasing the tornado, not having the tornado chase you. This episode was produced and edited by Brian Resnick, Noam Hassanfeld, and me, Meredith Hodnott, with extra help from Bird Pinkerton. Mandy Nguyen checked the facts, Christian Nyala sound design the tornadoes, and Noam scored the episode with some help from 3,000 rivers. And email any thoughts you might have about the show to Unexplainable at Vox.com. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you next Wednesday.