After distilling more than 800,000 square miles of America’s heartland into the singular “Midwest,” this is what you’re left with: deep-fried Snickers bars at state fairs; thick heat; pulverizing winters; alternating and unending fields of soybeans and corn; “Minnesota nice”; families of five spilling out from their crossover SUVs at a Dairy Queen along the highway as the sun slips below the silver maples on the horizon’s edge. Maybe “Midwest” sounds aspirational, the kind of place where family and industry and agriculture thrive. Or maybe it conjures up a province of nothingness, a flat, static swath to be flown over or interminably driven through. Like anywhere, the Midwest is much more than its clichés. When essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan called it “the most nowhere part of America,” he was championing its deceptive complexity, given that the more time you spend there, “you find that each of the different nowherenesses has laid claim to its own somewhereness.”
What this chunk of middle America is is a paradox: fertile and desolate, warm and alienating, sleepy and ambitious, massive and overlooked. And within this geographical oddity churn some of the most spectacular weather systems on the planet, which in turn generate any number of extreme meteorological conditions, from punishing heat waves to gooey humidity to grapefruit-sized hail to booming thunderstorms. When conditions are just right, one of the most mesmerizing and volatile of the natural phenomena emerges: the tornado.
Like the regions they terrorize, tornadoes are paradoxes, too. They are “one of the most awesome expressions of force in the natural world,” writes Brantley Hargrove in his gripping account of tornado chaser Tim Samaras, The Man Who Caught the Storm, yet they’re capable of exhibiting “incongruous tenderness.” Consider a moment early in Hargrove’s book that describes a twister touching down in Ringgold, Georgia, with such unrelenting, capricious force that it launched train cars into the sky but left a cake inside an otherwise demolished restaurant unscathed, “fit to be served … every last swirl of frosting was pristine.”
Such erratic tenderness can also read as random vengefulness. In the 1996 film Twister, Helen Hunt plays an Ahab-like storm chaser haunted by the mammoth tornado that killed her father. “You’ve never seen it miss this house,” Hunt desperately implores to fellow chaser Bill Paxton, “and miss that house, and come after you!”
Where I grew up in southeastern Minnesota, the whine of tornado sirens was a familiar intrusion, but a twister never actually came after me. Hearing so much about something in the news and not experiencing it for yourself can cause hesitancy and denial: You know tornadoes exist, yet they feel fantastical, the kind of thing that happened long ago and to other people. So I confess that when trailers for Twisters were running earlier this spring, I greeted them with an eye roll. Did we really need another natural disaster movie? Weren’t The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, Dante’s Peak, San Andreas, and Armageddon enough? But in fact, when it comes to tornadoes, maybe we do.
“Our perception of risk is mostly a function of what we’ve experienced,” Bill Bunting, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, told me in June. “And so if you haven’t experienced it, you can’t always imagine how bad it could get. … When it happens to you, it’s a different metric.”
Despite whatever creative liberties were no doubt taken by the screenwriters of the forthcoming Twisters, which according to its promotional material will tell the story of Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) as “opposing forces who come together to try to predict, and possibly tame, the immense power of tornadoes,” the movie is coming out at a time when more people than ever find themselves in the path of severe weather. While tornadoes have long occurred primarily from late March to early June in the southern Great Plains and Midwest region colloquially known as “Tornado Alley”—stretching from northern Texas up through South Dakota—over the past 50 years, they’ve been appearing more often farther east and south as well. “When the conditions are favorable, you can have a tornado, and it can be anywhere, in any state, in any town, at any time,” Bunting said, later adding, “And so while it’s sometimes useful to talk about where tornadoes occur most often when conditions are right, they can—and have—occurred in all 50 states and at all times of the year.”
Tornadoes are not some allegorical beast, a motif in a parable about nature’s dominion over humankind. They’re a uniquely mystifying natural phenomenon that continues to puzzle, and thus compel, scientists, storm chasers, and, as of late, storm tourists, who eschew luxury resorts for the chance to stay in hotels off the highway and bounce along in reinforced vans and Toyota 4Runners for days on end in hopes of sighting a tornado. “It’s one of the things that makes chasing so addictive, in a way, where it’s like you don’t know what to expect,” said David Williams, who runs the guided tornado-chasing outfit Tornado Alley Chasing. Regardless of whether you have any intention of storm chasing yourself, we are all subject to the whims of tornadoes’ unpredictable nature. A glimpse into the development of storm science and chasing over the past half century reveals both how far we’ve come in our attempt to understand these unruly tempests, and just how indecipherable their inner workings remain.
At a basic level, it’s still not entirely clear to even the most seasoned scientists how all the disparate conditions of a vicious storm coalesce into, well, a tornado. “The focus really has been for the last 10 years or so: How do tornadoes form?” said Erik Rasmussen, who has been chasing and studying tornadoes for 50 years and is now chief research scientist at the National Severe Storms Lab, also in Norman, Oklahoma. Although Rasmussen stopped counting the number of tornadoes he’d seen when he reached just short of 200—and that was 20 years ago—he still remarked with fresh astonishment how much tornadoes perplexed him.
“It’s just so amazing that we can see this happen over and over and over, right in front of our faces, and still not really be able to piece together exactly what just happened.”
As mysterious as tornadoes continue to be, the science behind them has come a long way since the late 1940s and early ’50s, when the U.S. government prohibited weather forecasts from even saying “tornado.” “The government was convinced that citizens were no more sensible than stampeding cattle,” Hargrove writes in The Man Who Caught the Storm,“that entire cities would descend into hysteria upon hearing the dread word, resulting in far more fatalities than the thing itself.” Tornadoes were something that could not be forecast any more than “the acts of a jealous God.”
When Rasmussen began chasing storms in the mid-’70s, there wasn’t much method to the seeming madness. He had a car—“a green Super Beetle with black mag wheels and yellow shag carpet”—and a deep interest in severe weather. “And really, there were no other storm chasers at that point,” Rasmussen remembered. “I’d be sitting out on a hillside in western Kansas with a meadowlark singing, just watching these incredibly wonderful storms, and there was not a soul around.”
Less than a decade later, on May 22, 1981, Rasmussen—no longer a lone wolf roaming the prairie—and a group of young storm chasers loaded up a van with recording equipment and set out in search of storms in Oklahoma’s arid plains. Rasmussen and Co. had been tasked by storm scientists with capturing the sound of tornado winds, following a hypothesis that an acoustic analysis could reveal something about a twister’s wind speed. The day had been largely uneventful, and at 6 p.m. that evening, it was “pretty tranquil,” Rasmussen remembered. Until, off in the distance, a tornado began to swell. Any chaser or storm scientist will tell you that forecasting tornadoes brings about a dilemma—you’ve been searching for this thing, and now you’ve found it. But does that mean you want it to exist? “You don’t want tornadoes to happen,” Rick Smith, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Forecast Office, told me, “but from a scientific perspective, you don’t want to be bad at your job, either.”
There was no dilemma about staying in the path of this particular tornado. Rasmussen and the team scrambled into their van and tried peeling out. But the tornado’s winds had whipped around and were now battering the van. “It started sliding our van sideways across the highway,” Rasmussen said. Every time the van exceeded 15 mph, it began fishtailing, so the team had to inch along the highway while behind them the tornado surged. When Rasmussen looked back over his shoulder, it didn’t inspire hope. “The sky was just debris from one horizon to the other,” he said.
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Even though the natural world’s awesome vengeance was converging on them, Rasmussen didn’t panic. “It was a strange experience because that was the most peaceful experience of my whole life,” Rasmussen remembered. “All of a sudden, whatever the brain chemistry does … it was not like, ‘Oh, oh shit, we’re gonna die.’ It was ‘OK, here it is.’” And then, serendipitously, the road bent, guiding their van gently out of the tornado’s path.
In the early ’80s, when Rasmussen was a graduate student and a member of renowned meteorologist Howard Bluestein’s research team, he navigated Tornado Alley in beat-up sedans and relied on paper maps glued to hunks of cardboard to track tornadoes’ progress. Within a decade, technology evolved rapidly with the field of storm science. Rasmussen spearheaded a pioneering project called VORTEX, from 1994 to 1995, for which he and his team developed the “mobile mesonet,” a kind of mobile weather station affixed to the roof of a car. Perhaps the most significant innovation was mobile radar, or Doppler on Wheels, invented in 1995 by Joshua Wurman and his team, which produced images of storms 10 times clearer than what scientists had ever gotten to that point. “I remember being in the K-Mart parking lot in Salina, Kansas … looking at the images [Wurman] collected, and just being blown away,” said Rasmussen, who would earn his PhD from Colorado State University in 1992 and become one of the preeminent tornado experts. “The details we could see that we’d never dreamed of just were astonishing.”
Shortly after Doppler on Wheels was put into action, Twister opened in theaters. Rasmussen witnessed an “explosion of storm chasing.” He wasn’t the only one to notice. In a 2013 op-ed for USA Today, John Knox, a professor of atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia, criticizes the “Twister effect.” Knox characterizes student interest in meteorology before Twister as a “pretty sedate and obscure pursuit, a small department or program at only a few dozen universities.” After Twister, “the total market penetration … changed everything.” Knox cites how schools designed courses centered on storm chasing and says that from 1994 to 2004, the number of students with meteorology degrees skyrocketed by 47 percent. “No other similar scientific field experienced a similar increase in degree recipients during this time,” Knox writes, “and many actually experienced decreases.”
Today, even those with just a passing interest in storms can join a tornado chase with one of the many tour companies on the market, which seem to bill themselves like safaris or fly-fishing outfitters, with the caveat that instead of spotting leopards or hooking steelhead, you might catch sight of a tornado in its natural element, ripping across northern Texas or the Great Plains or somewhere else in the Midwest. This spring, I reached out to a few of these outfits, wondering whether this sort of tourism was akin to those recreational expeditions to summit Mount Everest that critics have been bemoaning since the late 1990s—fool’s errands that turn a treacherous endeavor typically undertaken by only the most mentally and physically adept explorers into a novelty.
For what it’s worth, every guide with whom I spoke placed the utmost emphasis on safety, reiterating that they never put travelers in harm’s way. From what I could glean through extensive conversations with these guides, while a tornado tour poses risks like any other outdoor activity, those risks sound like they’re more in line with the occupational hazards of, say, a guided bus tour through Civil War battlefields than anything in the way of extreme sports (although Knox likened the larger storm-chasing culture to an “addiction” in need of of an “intervention” and said that “storm-chase culture has blown meteorology off-course”). For anywhere from $3,000 to $4,000 (airfare not included), you can spend a week on the undulating roads of Tornado Alley. If this sounds of interest to you, however, know that tornado-chasing tours are very popular; many bookings for 2025 are already sold out and have waiting lists.
Kim George of the chasing company Tempest Tours (whose logo and vans you can spot in the upcoming Twisters) clarified that the focus of any particular chase isn’t tornadoes. “Tornadoes are the gravy for us, but they’re not the meal,” George said. “The meal for us is supercells,” a type of thunderstorm that is particularly susceptible to forming tornadoes. When supercells form, Hargrove writes, “batten down the hatches—the titan of the sky is coming.” A supercell storm that materializes over the Great Plains is akin to an alien mothership. “To watch that beautiful creation in the middle of open fields,” George told me, “it is just gorgeous.”
When guided tour groups do encounter a tornado, it’s a cause for both celebration and contemplation, a push-pull dynamic no different from what meteorologists experience. “You’re fascinated by this,” Smith said, speaking on behalf of scientists and storm chasers alike. “You grew up wanting to learn more about tornadoes … and there is that professional excitement and adrenaline … on tornado day. But you don’t want there to be a tornado, so it’s kind of mentally exhausting in some ways.” Nick Drieschman, who runs Extreme Tornado Tours and got his start with arguably the most well-known storm chaser, Reed Timmer (star of Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers), told me, “If we have a situation where tornadoes have affected people, I kind of let [the tour group] know, ‘Hey, guys, I know everyone’s here to see a tornado. You paid a lot of money, you’ve come from far away, and it’s an amazing event, but there’s a bittersweet nature to tornadoes and what they do to people, and you guys need to understand that people’s lives were changed today.”
On occasion, amateur and recreational chasers who use their own mobile radar programs to track storms can be some of the first people on the scene of a disaster. On YouTube, videos abound of storm chasers rescuing people from demolished homes and rushing them to the hospital. At times, chasers spot tornados even before the weather services do, and they relay critical information regarding the size and speed of the storm. “Some of the best reports we get in some cases can be from storm chasers,” Smith said, later adding, “Because no matter how fancy our technology may look, no matter how sophisticated the radar displays that you see may appear, they can’t tell us for sure if a tornado is happening. … It takes a person, a human being, to do that.”
David Williams founded his company, Tornado Alley Chasing, with the goal of educating aspiring chasers. When Williams, a former English teacher turned PE instructor, first got into chasing, he struggled to find anyone who could teach him how to do it. “There wasn’t this plethora of opportunities right now of so many online education locations and forums and things like that,” he said. Although he later became interested in witnessing a wider array of storm systems, like supercells, at first his focus was solely on tornadoes. If he didn’t spot one, he considered that day’s chase a bust. “My ratio of successes to failures was really abysmal when I first started,” Williams told me. He estimates that, after earning his teaching degree, he spent about 500 hours teaching himself the basics of meteorology and forecasting.
Williams runs a small business. He takes only three people with him at a time, and if you ride with him, you’re not simply a tourist: You’re part of his team. “I’m teaching them forecasting in meteorology, what they’re looking at, how to chase successfully, [how to] get close to a tornado without being in harm’s way, all that stuff, so that they can apply it in their own chasing,” Williams said. If you decide that Williams’s offering is the right one for you, you don’t simply sign your name and slot in your credit card number. Because he will be depending on you to help navigate and spot hazards on the road, he requires any prospective member to go through a screening interview. “I do this with them to make sure they’re of sound body and mind,” Williams said. “And then also to make sure expectations are clear.” (After we spoke, Williams notified me that our interview would have counted as a screening interview and that if a spot opened up on a future tour, I could join him.)
For now, there exists an uneasy alliance between chasers and scientists. Rasmussen conceded that while he finds enthusiasm about the natural world heartening, the increased popularity of recreational storm chasing has made scientists’ jobs much harder at times. Miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic have forced Rasmussen to abandon some chases. “If the roads become more clogged than they are now as a result of Twisters,” Rasmussen told me, “then our mobile observing is finished.”
More tornadoes occur in the United States than anywhere in the world, although not because of a vengeful God. Rather, the country’s unique geography and topography make it the ideal incubator for tornadic storms. Warm, moist air rushes in from the Gulf of Mexico, colliding with cool, dry air pouring out of the high desert areas of the Southwest or aloft from the Rocky Mountains. These two winds smash together on something called the “dry line,” and if the hot, moist air below, which wants to rise, punctures the cool air above, it can create a mesocyclone, or a mass of air that powers fearsome supercell thunderstorms that rise into the sky. “Like a hot air balloon, OK?” said Harold Brooks, senior research scientist in the Forecast Research and Development Division of the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory.
The conditions that make the U.S. so conducive to tornadoes also make it difficult to determine what effect, if any, climate change has on these weather systems. If you imagine a chain of causal events between, say, rising global temperature, heat waves, and tornadoes, it might be possible to establish the link. But “in the tornado world,” Brooks said, “we don’t even know for sure how many links there are in the chain, and some of the links are really weak.”
What’s becoming clearer is that while tornadoes are hitting less frequently, when they do touch down, it’s in far greater numbers at one time. Research conducted by Joel Cohen, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor in the Laboratory of Populations at the Rockefeller University, and Michael K. Tippett, associate professor of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia University, found that from 1960 to 2010, tornado strikes were more sporadic. “You have the same number of tornadoes per year, but … more and more of them are falling into outbreaks,” Cohen told me. As defined by Cohen and Tippett, an outbreak is when tornadoes occur within six hours of one another as part of the same “weather event.” (The tornadoes that ravaged Iowa and Nebraska earlier this spring were classified as an outbreak.) Using an outbreak as a metric matters because, not surprisingly, the more tornadoes there are to hit you at once, the worse the results. “The first tornado weakens your house,” Cohen told me. “The second one takes your roof off.”
As of late, storm scientists have begun wrestling with a peculiar problem: No matter how adept their predictive technology is, they’re still having trouble getting people to listen to tornado warnings. “The fact that … annual death numbers have not changed much in the last 35 years, while our forecasting ability has changed a lot, that says to me … other stuff has to happen if outcomes are going to change,” Brooks said.
That “other stuff” is the social and behavioral factors that influence how humans make decisions when faced with impending disaster. How do people get their weather information? What compels them to act? How much information is too much? “If it’s a social media post,” Makenzie Krocak, who leads the National Severe Storms Laboratory’s social science team, told me, “you’re kind of limited to the types of content that you can share.”
On average, you have somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes to act on a tornado warning before the titan of the sky comes for your house. Obstacles as benign as wrangling your pet into its carrier or accounting for the steep stairs in your home can transform a seemingly smooth evacuation into a nightmare. And that’s if you’ve even paid attention to the warning at all. Krocak has found that someone like me, who’s never witnessed the aftermath of a tornado, let alone experienced one firsthand, is much less likely to seriously heed a tornado warning. “It’s something really different when you see actual damage from a tornado,” Krocak said, adding, “even videos and pictures often don’t do the amount of destruction justice. It’s really humbling. … Tornadoes are a beast.”
Perhaps the most impactful (i.e., lifesaving) advancements in tornado preparedness need to come not in the form of new atmospheric sensors or unmanned drones for even closer observation (which scientists are beginning to experiment with), but in sturdy, affordable housing. “[For] folks who live in mobile and manufactured homes, we know those homes are not safe, that they often are lofted in these storms,” Krocak said. Krocak acknowledged that following a tornado warning’s guidelines, which can necessitate leaving one’s home for up to six hours at a time, simply isn’t realistic for these residents. “Like, where are you supposed to go?” For his part, Brooks wondered whether perhaps the “whole shebang is housing quality”; rather than continuing to saturate the public with tornado warnings, when it comes to storm preparedness, efforts might be redirected toward constructing better infrastructure that doesn’t make it as crucial for residents to evacuate their homes.
When news reports broadcast the aftermath of towns obliterated by storms—tornadoes or otherwise—there can be a tendency to fault the residents afflicted by the storm. Why didn’t they run when they had the chance? Why didn’t they do that one other thing that might have saved them?
“A lot of times I think we just want to say, like, ‘Oh, that person just didn’t know, they were just ignorant or dumb or whatever,’” Krocak said. “And people aren’t dumb. People are busy, and people are complex.”
A tornado’s destructive power is determined by the “Enhanced Fujita Scale,” which ranges from zero to five. An EF-0 tornado produces wind gusts of up to 85 mph and will cause (relatively) minor damage, like displacing roof shingles or snapping tree limbs. An EF-5, on the other hand, powers gusts of greater than 200 mph. It’s the kind of tornado that “can wipe towns off the map,” Chris Mulcahy aptly described for WCNC in May, citing as an example a 2007 EF-5 storm that “leveled 95 percent of Greensburg, Kansas.” In the original Twister, one character describes an EF-5 tornado as “the finger of God.”
The scale is named for Professor Tetsuya Theodore “Ted” Fujita, who in the storm science community is known as “Mr. Tornado” (although, ironically, Fujita would study tornadoes for nearly 30 years before seeing one). Fujita’s contributions to the field of storm science are innumerable. Of interest to Twister fans might be his discovery that a tornadic storm is not simply one swirling tempest, but is in fact made up of numerous smaller vortexes, which explains how a tornado can sweep through a clump of homes and somehow miss this house but hit that one. Fujita also refined a method to effectively autopsy areas hit by a tornado so that he could reconstruct a map of the path the tornado probably followed.
It was a method he had used in the early fall of 1945, when he was brought in to examine the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the United States detonated its two atomic bombs. “He went to all of the graveyards around town and measured the burn shadows on the insides of the bamboo flutes [which held flowers]—the sides that had been facing away from the explosion,” Professor Emeritus Alfred Ziegler told the University of Chicago. “And just from that, he was able to triangulate very precisely where the bomb had come from and how far up in the sky it had been when it exploded.” Sketched from the top down, the damage assessment revealed a starburst pattern. Decades later, Fujita spotted an unusual similarity as he flew over fields and forests ravaged by tornadoes in the U.S. “Unexpectedly,” Fujita writes in his autobiography, Memoirs of an Effort to Unlock the Mystery of Severe Storms, “I came across starburst patterns of uprooted trees.”
As it happens, Nagasaki was not the original target for the “Fat Man” atomic bomb that would kill 140,000 civilians by the end of 1945. The bomb was supposed to be detonated 90 miles northeast, over the city of Kokura, just a few miles from the town of Tobata, where “Mr. Tornado” was living at the time of World War II and working as an assistant professor of physics at Meiji College of Technology. He was 24 years old on the morning of August 9, 1945, when a B-29 bomber nicknamed “Bock’s Car” made multiple passes over Kokura before deciding at the last moment to change targets. The crew of Bock’s Car noticed that they were running low on fuel and could see the sky beginning to pop off with antiaircraft fire and inbound Japanese fighter planes.
There was, of course, one more reason for Bock’s Car’s sudden course correction, why, in a sense, it skipped this city and annihilated that one. It’s a reason so seemingly random that we feel cursed by it on some days and blessed by it on others. On that particular day, what so often portends disaster instead afforded protection. Fujita and the citizens of Tobata and Kokura were spared that early August morning because the bomber crew flying overhead simply couldn’t see their target below. Why?
There were too many clouds in the sky.
Hal Sundt is a writer from Minnesota. His first book is Warplane: How the Military Reformers Birthed the A-10 Warthog. For more of his work, visit halsundt.com.
