A survivor's view from inside a tornado

What’s the dumbest thing Perry Samson says he’s ever done? Getting caught inside a tornado. But when you’re an atmospheric scientist who studies supercell thunderstorms—with a special interest in the ones that cause tornadoes—that sort of thing is a bit of an occupational hazard. Lucky for Perry, he also made a split-second decision while in the tornado that may be the smartest thing he’s ever done. So today on the show: What we can learn from nature at its wildest. Interested in more science behind the weather? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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  It's the middle of the day in Kansas in May, and yet it was like nighttime. We had to turn the lights on in the car just to see the road.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Perry Samson was looking up at a massive cloud, one that was blocking the whole sun.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  And to our south, we see rotation, and that's a sign that this cloud means business.

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  Most of us would have taken that as a sign to bolt out of there. But this is exactly what Perry was waiting for because he's an atmospheric scientist, and he was out there that day with his students to get them some hands-on experience.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  What more exciting bit of nature is there than a tornado? I mean, this is such an unusual event where this cloud is like several miles tall, and the whole damn thing is rotating. And you're sitting underneath this thing, and it's crackling like there's a large machine with sparks going off inside. It's unsettling to be in that situation.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  The situation was studying supercell thunderstorms. They're massive and known for often producing high winds, large hail, and even tornadoes.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Any meteorologist with a beating heart has an enthusiasm to study a supercell thunderstorm.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  And on this day, they'd found one.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  Holy smoke. T1? Yeah, go ahead. What you got? We have precept rapidly moving westward while the base of the cloud rapidly moves eastward. Oh, that's a tornado. Okay, we got a tornado on the ground directly to our south. We're gonna have, we may need to move east here. This is very close, guys. You may.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  That's a couple of Perry's students from a video they took that day. Perry followed the car with his students moving east until?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  I could not see the front of the car anymore.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  There was so much debris flying, the winds were so strong. And I knew it'd be dangerous to continue driving because I didn't know where my students were.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  And that was when he realized he was stuck inside a tornado.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Now, I have joked with my students for many years that if one of them could get a video inside a tornado looking straight up, they'd get an instant PhD. So I'm trying my darndest to take a picture since I know this is a rare, rare opportunity, and this might be my last opportunity. But it's so dark, the camera won't work.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  At that point, it was time to pray and get down on the seats and try to avoid damage if something came through the window. So the wind was blowing against me at a high rate of speed, and things were flying across this field and just vibrating on the front windshield and flying off. I'm thinking, my God, if there's a cow in this field, I've seen that movie. What a hard way to go.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  But then Perry made a radical decision that probably saved his life. So today on the show, how Perry Sampson survived inside a tornado and why supercell thunderstorms keep him coming back.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  I got to drive through the damn thing, and it blew the car across the road. So I'm a little shaken, but we're all okay.

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  I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 5:04Speaker 01

  So Perry, you survived the tornado. Like, you are talking to me not from the beyond, but in the same plane. You were out there studying supercell thunderstorms, the ones that produce tornadoes. What are supercell thunderstorms? And like, what drew you to them?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, I think they're supercell thunderstorms. It's sort of the ultimate thunderstorm. And they are much bigger than your run-of-the-mill thunderstorm. To create a supercell thunderstorm requires a unique set of conditions, one of which is what they call convective instability. Moisture, as it condenses, is going to release heat, and the heat is going to cause buoyancy in the atmosphere. But under certain conditions, that heat, that muggy moist air near the ground is contained by a layer maybe a mile above the surface. And it's called an inversion.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  A layer of what?

• 6:02Speaker 02

  It's a layer of air. I like to think of it like Saran Wrap or Jell-O or something.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Okay, it's like a heavy blanket on this muggy air.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  All this muggy air is contained in that layer, and so storm won't form. Another situation that has to happen is that high in the atmosphere, the jet stream plays a role. And along the jet stream, there are variations in wind speed. And those variations in wind speed cause what they call divergence, that basically the air is coming in at one speed, leaving at a faster speed. It causes a bit of a vacuum, which is going to aid any rising air.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Okay, it like churns things.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  It has the potential to churn things once you can break through that inversion.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  That like heavy blanket over that muggy air.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Right. And here's a point in class that I'd always ask the students. Which is heavier, muggy hot air versus hot dry air?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  I would think the muggy were one because it has water in it.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Most people would say that, but that's wrong.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  It turns out that the hot, dry air is heavier than the hot, muggy air. Why? Because we are adding in water vapor, and H2O is lighter than the nitrogen and oxygen.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Oh, so more can go in?

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  And that hot, dry air then moving out of, say, western Texas creates a dry line. And that can be a trigger for these storms.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Just the storms, not the tornadoes yet, right?

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Just the storm. And what we would do is our cars would be equipped with instruments, and we would drive looking for the spot where suddenly the dew point or the humidity changed dramatically. It's like fishing. You would just follow that dry line. It's one of the ways to identify places where these storms could form. And so that hot, dry air is able to basically push the hot moist air up and break through that inversion.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  And once you punch a hole in that inversion, then all hell breaks loose because this is hot air is going to be condensing. Condensing is going to release more heat. It becomes ever more buoyant, and you can just sit there without even a time lapse and watch these clouds grow rapidly.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  And so, once, once these clouds are growing rapidly, they're going up, what has to happen for that spiral rotation and that tornado to be produced?

• 8:23Speaker 02

  That air near the ground, that hot, muggy air, is usually coming from the south or southeast. And the air above the inversion is coming usually from the west. And so if you put a pencil between your two hands and rub them together, there's going to be a horizontal rotation.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  So take that horizontal rotation. Now you burst through the inversion. It's going to carry that rotation vertically.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  OK.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  And that, we think, plays a role in helping to form some of the rotation for a tornado.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  But so you were saying that you're following this dry line, kind of like fishing. And in this case, you were surprised. You're like, oh, my gosh, it's right behind us and it's going really fast. Why is it so hard to predict where tornadoes will emerge?

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, the very simplistic case I just gave you breaks down when you're actually in the field.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  How creates a specific tornado is that's why we study them.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  We don't yet know all the details of all the different forces that help organize those storms and so many large thunderstorms that don't produce a tornado.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  And obviously, to do a better job of predicting this and making people safe, requires far more research than we've already done.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  So Perry, what was the decision that saved your life?

• 9:46Speaker 02

  I wish I could take credit for the good decision here. I made the decision to do the wrong thing and wound up in a precarious spot. So the only decision I possibly made that was helpful was turning the car into the wind. Now, for the listeners, should you ever be in this situation, a tornado is bearing down on you, the advice is to get out of the car.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Really?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  The advice is to get into a ditch, get it somewhere low on the ground. Of course, the wind goes to zero at the surface. You can't move the ground so much. So what you're trying to do is simply avoid flying debris.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Best of all, listen to the warnings about severe weather and don't get in that area.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm just wondering, though, you couldn't open the doors. So you turn the car into the wind. You know, I'm not an atmospheric scientist. I'm a physicist. But I still don't understand why turning into the wind was better. Why did it help?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  My logic was that the aerodynamics of the engineers who built that Chevy Cobalt were smart enough to design it in such a way that it is going to be very aerodynamic. And yes, it was.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  So you're like, it survived a wind tunnel in its creation. So maybe it can survive this.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Well, that, plus in my mind, it's sitting sideways to the wind coming just made for a bigger.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Bigger surface area.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Bigger surface area, yes.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  And I had to get the picture. I was trying to get the picture.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. You're like, this is actually about my picture.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Yes, you get one shot.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  So so what happened after you got out of the tornado?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Once the head passed over me, I got out of the car. The car's embedded in mud. The wheel wells were just packed with mud. There's straw embedded in every crack. The roof of the car is lifted a little bit off the car body. The antenna is.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Bent.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  90 degree angle.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  We drove to the next town and took the car through a car wash, straightened the antenna and went on to chase the next storm. Every time I do this talk, I have to do a shout out to the Chevy Cobalt, a very aerodynamic vehicle if there ever was one.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. They should give you a free car. OK, you said that once you like cleaned the car and fixed it up and returned it to the rental company, Nun the Wiser, you did go out to another storm. Why did you do that? And what did you find?

• 12:13Speaker 02

  That's what we do. We're in the field and the opportunities don't exist often to see these supercell thunderstorms. It's like, why do you go to the Grand Canyon? I mean, again, I'm not trying to sell the idea of going to see these storms.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  You asked me why I would do it as a scientist.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  It's because I studied meteorology my whole life. And this is sort of the pinnacle of what meteorology creates. And like you with astronomy, I'm sure there are things that you go out and people ask, why are you standing outside in the middle of the night to see a distant comet?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  It's just, it's what you're there for.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm standing out there because I want to see a star explode. That's what I want to see.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Our interest in being in the field was to observe, make measurements and learn from the process. The fact that we survived is enough for me that, all right, let's let's take lessons learned here and maybe take a bit more caution.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Try to be the chaser and not the chasee.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Perry, thank you so much for talking with us today.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Stay well.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't chase tornadoes.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Do not chase tornadoes.

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  If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend, maybe one that loves the movie Twister, Twister 2. It really helps our show. This episode was produced by Arundhati Nair. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was An Li Wong. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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