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--:-- Host: A series of deadly tornadoes ripped through the United States on Friday.
--:-- Host: One of them might have been the longest tornado in the history of the country, and most of that one ended up in Kentucky.
--:-- Host: The damage is unlike anything the state's ever seen. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed. Thousands of homes are just gone.
--:-- Host: Some 60 people are dead at this point, and that number is expected to rise.
--:-- Host: And it'll take years to rebuild what was lost.
--:-- Host: It goes without saying that there wasn't enough advance warning for people.
--:-- Host: And with tornadoes, there never is.
--:-- Host: The average warning time for a tornado is about eight minutes.
--:-- Host: This past summer, our friends at the Unexplainable podcast tried to figure out why that is.
--:-- Host: Why we can't predict tornadoes better than we do.
--:-- Host: It turns out, if we want to get better at it, we're going to need to chase a whole lot of tornadoes instead of letting them chase us.
--:-- Host: Today, we're going to run that episode of theirs so you can better understand what we know and don't know about tornadoes.
--:-- Host: Here's Brian Resnick and Noam Hassenfeld from Unexplainable.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Forecasters are just really bad at this.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And when these warnings do come, they often don't precede a tornado.
--:-- Brian Resnick: 70, 80% of warnings don't actually come before a tornado.
--:-- Brian Resnick: They're false alarms.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: So you're saying people usually only have like seven minutes to get to safety.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: And then like three quarters of the time, there's no tornado, even when we do get the warning?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Yeah, this is where we are.
--:-- Brian Resnick: How is that possible?
--:-- Brian Resnick: How do we not understand this better?
--:-- Brian Resnick: The heart of it is actually kind of simple.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Tornadoes come from thunderstorms.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But meteorologists, they can look at two thunderstorms.
--:-- Brian Resnick: These thunderstorms will look identical.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But one will produce a tornado, and the other one won't.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And they really don't know what makes the difference.
--:-- Host: So what do scientists know about how tornadoes form?
--:-- Host: Yeah, I was wondering that too.
--:-- Host: I talked to Robin Tanamachi.
--:-- Host: She's a meteorologist at Purdue University in Indiana, and she knows everything there is to know about tornadoes.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: I teach mainly atmospheric science, radar meteorology, and severe storms meteorology.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: She's been fascinated by them her whole life.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: She told me this story of when she was a little girl, there was this tornado captured on the news by a news helicopter.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: We're about three quarters of a mile from the actual touchdown at this time.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: This is really spectacular.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And what did I see on the screen?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: But it was this gorgeous helical tornado, and it was live.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: I'm going to have to leave this area here.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: The debris is drifting my way here.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Please do, Max.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And I believe at this point the helicopter pilot is realizing, whoa, we've got a live tornado on our hands.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And so they're maneuvering around it, trying to keep a safe distance from it.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Right now the tornado is located over a wooded area, and it is ripping entire pine trees into the air thousands of feet.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: She remembers just like thinking, I can't get enough of that.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: She couldn't look away.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: My thought was just, what is it that's making this happen?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: You know, what is it in the environment that's necessitating that this thing exists?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And what makes it so powerful?
--:-- Host: What's Robin learned so far?
--:-- Host: Well, obviously, she hasn't gotten to that holy grail of being able to predict and know everything about the formation of a single tornado.
--:-- Host: But on the bigger picture, she does know where they come from.
--:-- Host: Mainly, they come from here.
--:-- Host: They come from the U.S.
--:-- Host: There are definitely hot spots all over the world, but the United States by far gets the most of them.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: So, like I said, tornadoes come from thunderstorms.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: A thunderstorm you can think of as an organism that ingests and eats warm, moist air.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And warm, moist air, we got that in spades.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: That comes from the Gulf of Mexico.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And that's moving north from the Gulf.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: This tide of moist air that just keeps sloshing northward from the Gulf of Mexico over the southern tier of states.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And then it hits two dry streams.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: So one, we got dry air from the Rockies.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And two, we've got dry air coming off the Mexican plateau.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: So that warm moist air from the Gulf it meets those other two streams and gets pulled up into them
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: But those two streams are moving in different directions
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: So all that air begins to twist and condense and form clouds
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: It will start to rotate just on its own.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Spontaneously, that air will be torqued and twisted.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: 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 cyclone.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Yeah, something like that.
--:-- Host: How does Robin think about it?
--:-- Host: It's like a big barber pole in the middle where the air is rising, but it's also twisting as it goes up.
--:-- Host: This is the heart of a supercell.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Supercell?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Yeah.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Supercells are these mega thunderstorms that spawn tornadoes.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Okay.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: They rotate, so they're kind of like these mini hurricanes.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And the big question is, like, how do you take this big kind of lumbering rotation in the sky from these supercells?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And how does that get concentrated down into this vortex that actually extends from the cloud all the way to the ground?
--:-- Host: Okay, so we know the U.S. has all these supercells, these big, twisting thunderstorms, and those sort of give birth to tornadoes.
--:-- Host: So do scientists have any right ideas here?
--:-- Host: Like, what sets this process off?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Well, before they even get to there, it's more like they don't see what sets it off.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: That process is probably happening on timescales of just a few seconds or less.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: All this happens so fast.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Weather radar, like our number one tool for observing storms, it just can't see it.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Why can't radar see tornadoes?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Well, one part of the problem is it basically picks up on moisture, rain.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And you can infer things from rain, like wind speed, like you determine how fast that rain is moving.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: But it's like this incomplete picture of a storm.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: The other problem with radar is physically radar is this dish that spins.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And so every time it spins, it takes an observation of the thing that it's observing, like a storm.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: But that takes a few moments for it to spin.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: You can have, you know, a big lazy vortex in one scan.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And by the time the radar swings around again, you've got a tornado.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: The effect is kind of like if you were watching a dancer under a strobe light.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: The dancer being the storm and the strobe light being like the radar that can only capture it in certain moments.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: So the dancer starts dancing, she's spinning, and you get a slice of it.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And then the dish rotates a bit and it sees a bit.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And then it misses a bit.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And then it sees a bit and then it misses a bit.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: We're scanning it too slowly to see this very rapid process that's happening.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Whatever causes a tornado to spawn, it often happens when that dancer is in the dark.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: 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?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Yeah.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Researchers are so in the dark, They're not always sure if the tornado forms from the storm cloud down or from the surface of the Earth up, or if both things happen at the same time and then they connect in this explosive way.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: It's just the basic idea here is what we can't see, we can't predict.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: A lot of times this process is either invisible or opaque.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: It's like a magician's sleight of hand trick.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Again, imagine two thunderstorms that look identical and one produces a tornado.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Well, the one that's producing a tornado is like performing a trick that we just can't see.
--:-- Host: Our current paradigm for warning for tornadoes is something called warn-on detection, meaning either it's indicated by radar or somebody in the field has phoned in and reported it.
--:-- Host: So the tornado has been detected, you issue a warning.
--:-- Host: Wait, but I thought you said there were a lot of false alarms.
--:-- Host: Like the majority of the time it's sent out, it's a false alarm.
--:-- Host: So how could it be a false alarm if they detect the tornado and then alert people?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Oh, it's because often when a tornado is indicated by radar, it's not a real tornado.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: So it's a false detection.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And it's a false detection for all the reasons why I said radar isn't that great.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: It just gets it wrong.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: It just can't see everything that's happening.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And these false alarms, it's not just a meteorological problem.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: It's a psychological problem, too.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: You know, like the boy who cried wolf syndrome.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: If you issue too many tornado warnings, people start to not trust them as much.
--:-- Host: 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.
--:-- Host: 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 way with this boy who cried wolf syndrome, I mean, how do you solve the tornado problem?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: So for one, I'm really pushing for just better, faster radar that can scan areas more quickly.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: 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.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Like a faster strobe light.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: But really what meteorologists want is better prediction, better 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.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: If they can do that then they can warn on forecasts and say like 30 minutes from now we run the computer models and this storm is going to create a tornado and you should get out of the way.
--:-- Host: Yeah we love it if people could have up to 30 minutes to an hour I mean, that's where you make a completely different set of decisions.
--:-- Host: And I assume to get a better AI system, you just got to input tons and tons of tornadoes all over the country, right?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Yeah.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And a big challenge here is that tornadoes are so varied.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: They come in all these shapes and sizes.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: 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.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: They seem to be very sensitive to local environmental conditions.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: So what forms a tornado in one area might not form it in another.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Maybe just like the presence of trees changes the equation.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: And tornadoes behave differently in different parts of the country.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: That huge spectrum makes studying tornadoes really cool, but it also makes studying them really hard.
--:-- Host: 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?
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: Yeah, yeah. That's a funny conundrum here.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: We need more data from the tornadoes themselves, but we don't know when they're going to show up.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: 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.
--:-- Robin Tanamachi: We have to go storm chasing.
--:-- Host: Storm chasing.
--:-- Host: Storm chasing.
--:-- Host: After the break.
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--:-- Host: It's Today Explained, and today we're running an episode of the Unexplainable podcast, also from Vox.
--:-- Host: It ran in their feed back in July, and it's one about the mysteries surrounding tornadoes.
--:-- Host: And one way to solve those mysteries is to storm chase.
--:-- Host: And you're about to hear from a guy who's very excited about chasing tornadoes.
--:-- Host: So excited he even took his kid chasing a tornado.
--:-- Host: I know that might be hard to believe considering this weekend's events, but this is a professional who knows what he's doing.
--:-- Host: And just for the record, he is talking about chasing storms back in July of this year.
--:-- Host: With that being said, here we go.
--:-- Host: Back to Unexplainable.
--:-- Jeff Weber: 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.
--:-- Jeff Weber: So this is Jeff Weber.
--:-- Jeff Weber: He is an atmospheric scientist.
--:-- Jeff Weber: He's stood on a few rooftops.
--:-- Jeff Weber: He's chased a few storms.
--:-- Jeff Weber: He actually chased one recently with his 12-year-old son.
--:-- Jeff Weber: Admittedly, I planted the seed, but he is really into it.
--:-- Jeff Weber: And after seeing his first tornado last week, he can't get enough.
--:-- Jeff Weber: He wants to just keep doing it.
--:-- Jeff Weber: Oh, my God.
--:-- Jeff Weber: What happened on this day?
--:-- Jeff Weber: Well, we're in the house.
--:-- Jeff Weber: Tornados were not forecast to develop anywhere near us for this day.
--:-- Jeff Weber: But a tornado warning went off on my phone.
--:-- Jeff Weber: As an atmospheric guy, I have about five weather apps, and my phone started blowing up with this tornado warning.
--:-- Jeff Weber: I'm like, a tornado warning? that doesn't seem right.
--:-- Jeff Weber: So I tell my son to run out into the backyard and see if he can see it.
--:-- Jeff Weber: We did take some video and five seconds later, I hear him shrieking at the top of his voice.
--:-- Jeff Weber: I see it! I see it!
--:-- Jeff Weber: So we all run out, take pictures from the backyard and I'm like, hey buddy, you know, this is pretty cool.
--:-- Jeff Weber: He goes, we gotta go. We gotta chase it. Let's go.
--:-- Jeff Weber: 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.
--:-- Jeff Weber: We could see the tornado from the top of the cloud deck all the way to the surface of the ground.
--:-- Jeff Weber: We could see the hail shaft.
--:-- Jeff Weber: We could see the heavy rain.
--:-- Jeff Weber: We could see the shelf cloud rotating above the tornado.
--:-- Jeff Weber: Oh my God.
--:-- Jeff Weber: By the time we got up close to it, it was spectacular.
--:-- Jeff Weber: We could see the rotation.
--:-- Jeff Weber: We could see the dirt being dug up from the ground.
--:-- Jeff Weber: It was just an incredible event.
--:-- Host: My heart's pumping just listening to this.
--:-- Host: It is awe It is truly awesome It is my mouth is like open as I staring at this thing spinning It amazing It unreal
--:-- Host: What was it like to share that with your son?
--:-- Host: It was one of the highlights of my life.
--:-- Host: 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.
--:-- Host: I see it! I see it!
--:-- Host: So to start simply here, why is chasing tornadoes so important?
--:-- Host: Why can't we study them more remotely?
--:-- Jeff Weber: The most important things for a tornado to form is temperature, humidity, wind direction, and speed.
--:-- Jeff Weber: But we need them at the surface, we need them at the upper atmosphere, and we need them at levels throughout the entire atmosphere.
--:-- Jeff Weber: And so to get that complete data set all around the tornado at all the different levels is very difficult.
--:-- Host: Why don't we have this now?
--:-- Host: Is it just like our typical weather radar doesn't take on all this information?
--:-- Jeff Weber: It's difficult to get this complete data set because tornadoes don't stay on the ground for a long period of time.
--:-- Jeff Weber: And we don't know in advance where they're going to show up.
--:-- Host: So if you want to do a contrast with hurricanes, for example, they take days, if not weeks, to cross the Atlantic.
--:-- Host: And we have the luxury of that time to fly planes through the eyewall of that hurricane and get those measurements.
--:-- Host: With a tornado, we don't have that luxury of time.
--:-- Host: They might be on the ground for as little as a few minutes.
--:-- Host: And so to be able to marshal all of those instrumentations and planes or sensors, it's very difficult.
--:-- Host: 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?
--:-- Host: We need dozens, if not hundreds.
--:-- Host: They're kind of like snowflakes.
--:-- Host: No two tornadoes are exactly alike.
--:-- Host: 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.
--:-- Host: And we have no idea why.
--:-- Jeff Weber: 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 data sets without putting humans in harm's way.
--:-- Jeff Weber: 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 why it formed, but we can look at nuances and subtleties and differences on why one tornado formed different than another one.
--:-- Jeff Weber: And that's when we can unravel the mystery.
--:-- Host: Why are you confident that it's just the problem of more data?
--:-- Host: 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?
--:-- Jeff Weber: Yeah, I appreciate that perspective.
--:-- Jeff Weber: 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.
--:-- Jeff Weber: We know what we're dealing with.
--:-- Jeff Weber: And if we can close the box, so to speak, around the tornado, we should be able to explain what's going on.
--:-- Jeff Weber: 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.
--:-- Host: You're saying that our atmosphere is knowable, things that we can measure.
--:-- Host: We just need finer and finer grained resolution.
--:-- Jeff Weber: Exactly.
--:-- Jeff Weber: There's no new physics being brought about by a tornado.
--:-- Jeff Weber: The atmosphere is very well understood.
--:-- Jeff Weber: The laws of physics are very well understood.
--:-- Jeff Weber: We just need to see at these smaller scales how they interact to create the tornado.
--:-- Host: I love how a lot of this boils down to, well, to better understand tornadoes, we need to keep chasing them, right?
--:-- Host: Is that what I'm hearing here?
--:-- Jeff Weber: Most definitely.
--:-- Jeff Weber: Just photographs from the public can be incredibly helpful.
--:-- Jeff Weber: We're still at that point where photographs can gain insight into the structure of the tornado.
--:-- Host: Only if you're trained and know what you're doing.
--:-- Host: They are very dangerous, but if you approach them from the backside, that's the smart approach.
--:-- Host: They should be going away from you, I imagine.
--:-- Host: You should be chasing the tornado, not having the tornado chase you.
--:-- Host: This episode was produced and edited by Brian Resnick, Noam Hassenfeld, and me, Meredith Hodnot.
--:-- Host: With extra help from Bird Pinkerton.
--:-- Host: Mandy Nguyen checked the facts, Christian Ayala sound designed the tornadoes, and Noam scored the episode with some help from 3,000 Rivers.
--:-- Host: Lauren Katz heads up our newsletter, and Liz Kelly Nelson is the VP of Vox Audio.
--:-- Host: You can sign up for our newsletter at vox.com slash unexplainable and email any thoughts you might have about the show to unexplainable at vox.com.
--:-- Host: Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you next Wednesday.
