An American scientist describes, in first person, what it’s like to be inside a tornado, combining a survival story with a scientific explanation of the atmospheric phenomena that give rise to these storms.
O Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Michigan, was lucky enough to survive to recount the experience, in this article published on the website .
Inside a tornado: the story of a scientist who survived
I saw the center of a monster. Most people describe the sound of a tornado as that of a freight train, but up close it’s more like the roar of a thousand jet engines. I’m one of the few people on Earth who has driven into a tornado and survived to tell the tale.
Although it may seem like a scene from a Hollywood movie, with a high-tech armored truck, my experience was much more dangerous and terrifying.
I’m an atmospheric scientist who studies tornadoes, but I’m only alive today thanks to split-second decisions and a huge dose of luck. Believe me: I don’t want to go through this again.
The day the sky opened
It all started in the northwest of Kansaswhere I studied supercell storms, the type of storms that produce tornadoes, with a team of students from the University of Michigan.
We were positioned in a storm so dark that we had to turn on our vehicle headlights in the middle of the day. Suddenly, a tornado formed and began moving directly toward us.
The students were in other vehicles and managed to escape, but my car was quickly swallowed by a cloud of debris so thick that I could no longer see the hood itself.
With options running out, I made a desperate decision: I turned the car into the wind, hoping that the vehicle’s aerodynamics would keep us rooted to the ground, rather than being projected like a toy.
The storm that the scientist survived, filmed by students who were nearby, inside other vehicles.
The physics of fear
When you are inside the vortex of a tornado, your body experiences phenomena that television cameras cannot capture:
A tornado is a localized area of rapidly changing pressure. The ears don’t just pop, they hurt, as if the head were being crushed by giant hands.
Total darkness: In films, the “eye” appears as a clear space. In reality, it is a mass of debris, a dark brown mix of pulverized soil, trees and buildings. It was so dark that my camera couldn’t capture any images.
As the debris hit the windshield, he feared being hit by flying materials. Tornadoes can rip fences, wood and metal from buildings, tree branches and even large animals.
The formation of a monster
Perry Samson
Fuel: A tornado requires warm, moist air close to the ground, with dry air above. This creates the potential for air to rise, as long as the atmosphere is unstable enough to overcome the thermal inversion layer.
Thermal inversion layer: A thin layer of stable air acts like a lid, trapping warm, moist air until it can break through this barrier.
Dry line: It’s the area where warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico meets dry air coming in from the west. Hot, dry air is, in practice, denser and forces moist air to rise, breaking the thermal inversion.
Wind shear: Winds from the south at the surface and from the west at altitude generate horizontal rotation in the atmosphere. When the air rises, this rotation becomes vertical, forming a mesocyclone.
Jet stream: Located between about 8 and 11 kilometers in altitude, it is a fast flowing air. Disturbances in this current can create zones that “pull” upward air, reducing pressure at the surface.
Together, these factors can generate the rotating vortex that we know as a tornado.
These storms can reach winds of up to 300 miles per hour and leave a trail of destruction more than a mile wide.
They can last for seconds or several minutes, destroying buildings and trees in their path. As it is difficult to predict its trajectory, seeking shelter should always be the priority.
The monster’s lesson
When the storm passed, the silence was unsettling. The car he had rented was stuck in the mud, the antenna bent and pieces of straw embedded in every crevice of the body.
Tornadoes are extremely dangerous. Sixty-one people have died in the United States in 2025 from tornadoes, and many more have been injured by flying debris.
It is essential to know how to act when there is an alert: follow instructions and seek shelter immediately.
When scientists chase storms, they are not looking for extreme experiences, but rather to measure small-scale processes that occur inside these storms and that cannot be observed in any other way.
Many of the mechanisms that give rise to tornadoes occur a few hundred meters above the ground and develop within minutes, which makes them difficult to detect by radars, satellites and weather stations.
Watching a tornado and the damage it causes is a powerful reminder that humans don’t control everything. It is also an alert to the need for prudence and preparation.
Drone and radar research is the safest and most effective way to study these phenomena. Walking into a tornado is definitely not an option
