Cyclone; or, The Tornado You See Hides The Danger You Can't
Meteorology has always been a mild fascination to me. It never grew into an obsession like motorsports or audio production have, but is generally a topic I love to learn about. Watching rain clouds develop and travel across the countryside on radars, guessing with decent accuracy where they'll be going and whether they'll intensify or dissipate has always been a bit of a fun game to me. Over the years I've learned bits and pieces about meteorological phenomenon and have used it to enhance my ability to understand weather predictions from meteorologists.
One thing has always remained as much a mystery to me as meteorologists themselves, however: Tornadoes.
Thanks to the Twister movie released in 1996 and its remake in 2024, as well as historic tornado outbreaks throughout history, most people have a general idea how tornadoes work. They're caused by rotation in a severe thunderstorm, and can vary in strength - from only being able to rip shingles off of roofs to completely decimating anything that isn't built underground. While there are more specifics into the mechanics of a tornado, the full scientific understanding of tornadoes is yet to come to fruition.
Typically, tornadoes rush in a path towards the northeast, but not always. Tornadoes happen most often in North America's Tornado Alley in a large section of the USA north of the Gulf of Mexico, but they can still happen anywhere. A majority of tornadoes are short-lived EF1 and EF2 twisters, but some of the most historic, record-breaking tornadoes have had absurdly long damage paths. Very little is known about why tornadoes that break from the norm, do so. Given that meteorologists still have unanswered questions about twisters, it's pretty easy to assume the general public has even less knowledge about tornadoes.
So, here's some important information to know if you're in a tornado emergency.
1: Tornadoes aren't always visible.
The typical mental image of a tornado people have is that of a photogenic stovepipe, easily visible from a long distance away. The problem is, a majority of dangerous tornadoes are actually shrouded in rain and made almost entirely invisible to the naked eye. Keeping eye contact is not always possible, making the path of the tornado more difficult to predict without radar assistance. This also makes escaping the tornado more difficult because the tornado is so much harder to track. Even worse than that, the actual visible tornado that everybody imagines is only a condensation funnel; the moisture in the air has been compressed to take the form of a rope of cloud stretching from the sky to the ground. This doesn't actually represent the tornadic windspeeds surrounding the tornado. So in reality, if you're staring down a tornado you're only seeing part of the picture. This is actually part of the reason the El Reno EF5 tornado was so dangerous; while the multi-vortex tornado was quite large, even storm chasers weren't aware that the tornadic windfield this tornado produced grew to over 2 miles wide, which was about a mile wider than the condensation funnel. A condensation funnel doesn't even have to be visible for tornadic windfields to form. If you can see debris flying around on the ground but no condensation funnel to go with it, it's still a tornado.
2: Small tornadoes aren't necessarily less dangerous.
One of the scariest tornadoes I've ever learned about was actually an F5 tornado in Elie, Manitoba, Canada. It's the only Canadian F5 tornado on record. This tornado was fairly small, and for most of its life only did F3 damage at maximum. When analyzing the damage left behind by the tornado, engineers argued about potential F5 damage that had been caused by the tornado, but realized the damage was more likely caused by sustained F3 damage as the tornado looped over the same patch of land for nearly a minute. However, this F3 tornado was upgraded to an F5 when a bystander's footage of the tornado showed a house being lifted off of its foundation as a whole unit, before being shredded apart by the tornadic windfield in mid-air and reduced to splinters. The tornado's small stature acted like a spinning figure skater tightening their legs around them to spin faster. The Elie, Manitoba's tightened tornado spun the windfield faster and faster around the center of the cyclone, giving it the power to lift an entire house off the ground and crumple it into debris before it even hit the ground.
3: Tornado paths are erratic.
Tornadoes usually travel in a northeast pathway, but not always. The Elie F5 pathing is a perfect example of this. It traveled directly south across the Trans-Canada highway, bent east for a short time, changed its mind and turned south again directly toward a mill. After passing by the mill, almost as if the tornado was capable of sentient thought and decided it hadn't done enough, the Elie tornado looped back around to strike the exact same path through the mill it had just torn through. It continued south before, again as if capable of thinking, saw the nearby town of Elie and turned directly east to head straight for the southern part of town. At this point the cyclone tightened, intensifying its tornadic windfield as it approached. It dipped slightly south, just barely missing the town, but - yet again, as if powered by sentience - 'corrected' its pathing and performed yet another loop to give the southern portion of the small town a heavy blow of mostly F3 winds except for the very short burst of F5 winds. Seemingly satisfied with its destruction, the tornado traveled southwest and away from town - in complete opposition to the expected pathways of any tornado like it - before it eventually disappeared. This tornado is not an exception either; numerous dangerous tornadoes, including the infamous El Reno EF5 tornado, ran very erratic and unpredictable pathways.
4: Mobile homes are death traps.
A significant majority of tornado death tolls are found in trailer parks. Mobile homes are incredibly fragile in comparison to even poorly built single family homes. Mobile homes aren't permanently fixed to a foundation like a typical house is, instead it's propped up on stilt-like platforms that allow a long flatbed trailer to slip underneath for transport. Even weak EF1 windspeeds are enough to shake the mobile home and shift it on its platforms to dangerous and unstable positions, and EF2 winds can topple the house and turn it into a massive, deadly tumbledrying machine with all the furniture inside flying around dangerously. Debris from other mobile homes can also pierce through the mobile home's thin walls as wood, shingles, nails and aluminum turn into killer projectiles. Stronger winds can shred mobile homes into pieces. The common sentiment in dangerous tornado situations is to get into a tight space like a bathroom and cover yourself with a mattress or wear helmets to protect yourself, but this sentiment doesn't work in a mobile home. Trailers are by far the most dangerous structures to be in under threat of a tornado. Mobile homes are so dangerous, in fact, that it's firmly recommended that people living in mobile homes are to get in their cars and drive to the nearest strong structure rather than wait out the storm in a trailer. In basic terms, a mobile home becomes a fragmentation grenade when it's under threat of a tornado.
5: Tornadoes are going to get worse.
As we're all aware (hopefully), global warming is causing severe weather to strengthen and turn even more dangerous. This is no exception to tornadoes. While an EF5 tornado hasn't been declared since the killer El Reno EF5 monster, it's worth noting that tornadoes are only classified by analyzing the damage caused after the tornadoes have passed. Since a majority of tornadoes appear and dissolve harmlessly through farmland or forests, there aren't enough structures nearby to fully estimate the power of the tornado. It's entirely likely that we have just 'gotten lucky,' with the most severe tornadoes we've seen yet only appearing in uninhabited land. According to a paper by USA's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, average annual tornado occurrences have increased from about 850 tornadoes in the 70's to around 1200 tornadoes in the 1990's, and the number has hovered around 1200 since then. While we're currently in an "EF5 drought," tornado occurrences in the past few years have only slightly dropped away from normal. This isn't to say an EF5 is the only destructive tornado, however; EF3's are still as common as always, and as explained earlier even an EF2 can cause fatalities.
Scientists are still trying to figure out how tornadoes circulate and travel across our geography. While they have a good understanding of what a typical tornado does, deviations from the norm are yet to be explained. However, more research than ever has been going into tornadoes in the past 30 years, and it's likely some major breakthroughs in the science of tornadoes could be made in the next 10 years. Even so, here's some quick tips to keep yourself safe when under threat of a tornado.
- In a mobile home, escape as soon as possible to a stronger structure to take shelter.
- In a house, take shelter in the basement or on the ground floor in a small room that isn't connected to the exterior walls. Wearing a helmet and covering yourself with a mattress might also be a good idea.
- If you're outside and see a tornado, find the nearest strong structure as fast as possible and take shelter. If there's no shelter nearby, find the lowest point in the ground near you like a ditch, get as low to the ground as possible and cover your head.
- Don't hide under an overpass or a bridge. Wind can actually funnel through the bridge and intensify, defeating the purpose of getting under the bridge in the first place.
- Be prepared. Even if you're outside tornado alley, it's always a great idea to have a plan of action in case of an emergency. Find some cheap, comfortable clothes at a thrift store and buy some essentials to keep in a "go bag" for the express, sole purpose of an emergency. Perform emergency drills enacting your action plan, because it's very easy to forget what to do in a panic. Staying calm is one of the most essential tools at your disposal; being scared can reduce the effectiveness of your decision making, and any hesitation can be the difference between life and death.