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As you stand at your window, looking out at a sky filled with dark clouds that are pouring down sheets of rain and hail, suddenly, it happens. A twisting column of grey descends from the clouds. At first, it's just hanging there, suspended above the land. But it soon reaches down and makes contact with the ground. At the same time, it turns even darker as it picks up dirt and debris. If you're lucky, you make it to a shelter before you can witness the immense swirling winds pulling up animals, cars, and buildings in its wake. This harsh reality can occur anywhere in the world. However, by a wide margin, most tornadoes happen in the United States, more than if you combined the yearly average number of tornadoes in every country in the rest of the world. The U.S. is also the only country to regularly experience tornadoes that reach the highest classification of violent, which cause the highest percentage of deaths. Each year in the United States, there are over a thousand reported tornadoes. And on average, these result in around 80 casualties. But some years, it's much worse. Like in 2011. The 2011 Super Outbreak was the largest, costliest, and one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks ever recorded, taking place in the southern, midwestern, and northeastern United States from April 25th to 28th. It resulted in roughly $12 billion in damages and left an estimated 321 people dead. Tornado deaths are caused when an individual is picked up by the strong winds or when they're struck by a large chunk of flying debris. While the death rate is significantly lower than it was in the early 1900s, the seemingly random and spontaneous nature of tornadoes makes them one of the most difficult to predict weather phenomena. Current forecasts of incoming tornadoes only provide an average of an 8.4 minute lead time. And in a scenario where not only your possessions are at stake, but the lives of you and your family, every second counts. How and why do some tornadoes become so destructive, and just how big can they get? And how might we one day be able to predict them better? For such a well-known phenomenon, we know surprisingly little about how tornadoes actually form. And understanding how they form is crucial for developing better tornado prediction models. Some scientists risk their own lives by getting up close and personal with these violent storms, all in an effort to determine exactly what's happening in and around the tornado. Most tornadoes begin with a supercell, a storm with a persistent rotating updraft at its core. Supercells form due to a particular combination of winds, when wind speed and direction are different at different altitudes. This is called wind shear. When wind at ground level is blowing one direction and wind higher in the atmosphere is blowing another direction, it can cause a horizontal tube of air to form. Then, as warm, humid air rises and cool air falls, the horizontal tube of rotating air can be pushed to become a vertical one called a vortex or a mesocyclone, which can have a diameter of 5 to 20 kilometers. At this point, the whole storm starts rotating, and the supercell is born. This type of storm is the parent of most tornadoes. Near the ground, the mesocyclone can be narrowed by the strong updraft. This process, called vortex stretching, speeds up the circulation. This creates a funnel cloud. Then, the downdraft brings the rotation down to the ground, and a tornado is born. Low pressure systems in the U.S. pull warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and cool, dry air aloft from the Rocky Mountains or the high desert in the southwest, creating consistent wind shear. The states that fall between these regions end up being in the ideal location for severe tornadoes to form. But this is all a bit of an approximation. Exactly what the right conditions are for tornadoes to form is still a bit of a mystery. In an effort to answer the many questions remaining about tornado formation, the NOAA National Severe Storms Lab launched a research project in 1995 called the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment, or more simply, VORTEX. There were several iterations, the largest of which, VORTEX-2, took place in 2009. It included over 100 scientists who used cutting-edge equipment to analyze weather measurements taken around supercell thunderstorms across 10,000 miles of the southern and central U.S., an area dubbed Tornado Alley. Over the span of one month, they collected data from 11 supercell storms, including one supercell tornado. The results from this project indicated that tornado formation is related to the temperature differences at the edges of the spinning air. But that might not always be the case. Mathematical models and real-life observations have demonstrated that tornadoes can arise with very little temperature difference. Clearly, there's a lot more to uncover on exactly what makes a tornado form. How they dissipate is not much clearer. Scientists are still debating the details, but generally, a tornado stops when it loses its source of instability, like heat or moisture, or its vorticity. One way this could happen is by encountering a cold flow of wind from a rainstorm called an outflow. But of course, it's what happens between its formation and dissipation that's really important. How much damage did it cause? How many lives did it take? Just how destructive was it? This is what a tornado's rating is based on. After a tornado has ended, experts examine and tally up the damage. They look at what type of buildings were affected and how badly they suffered. They then use the enhanced Fujita scale to assign a rating from 0 to 5. This assessment is also used to estimate wind speeds, varying from 100 to over 320 km per hour. And assessing the damage is often the only way scientists can estimate how strong a tornado was, since it's rare that they're able to take a direct wind speed measurement. And sometimes the damage is absolutely catastrophic. Out of those that have had their wind speed directly measured, the tornado with the highest wind speed began in Bridge Creek, Oklahoma on May 3, 1999 during a massive tornado outbreak involving over 70 tornadoes. This particular EF-4, EF-5 tornado traveled across heavily populated areas in Oklahoma and with wind speeds topping 512 km per hour, it completely obliterated over 200 homes over the course of one and a half hours, killing 36 people. It was classified as an EF-5, because the EF-5 category has no upper limit. But its wind speeds were so fast, some scientists think it should have fallen into its own new category, an EF-6. The problem with creating an EF-6 category is that the vast majority of structures are simply gone at the EF-5 rating. And besides the rare tornado like the Bridge Creek Moor tornado that has its wind speed directly measured, the rating comes from the destruction it leaves behind. And complete and total obliteration looks the same if the wind was 350 km per hour or 550 km per hour. Scientists believe that theoretically the fastest tornado possible on Earth would be 611 km per hour. The Bridge Creek Moor tornado was not far off. But while the Bridge Creek Moor tornado certainly was devastating, it was not even close to the deadliest. On April 26, 1989, a single tornado in Bangladesh took at least 1,300 lives and left 80,000 homeless. It was estimated to be an EF-4 tornado, with wind speeds of 338 to 418 km per hour. The devastation was so complete that except for some skeletons of trees, there were no signs that there had ever been any standing structures. And the deadliest tornado in US history was the Tri-State Tornado on March 18, 1925, which resulted in a death toll of a whopping 695 people. One tornado killing almost twice as many as the super outbreak in 2011, which was made up of 300 separate tornadoes. The Tri-State Tornado's name comes from its journey from southern Missouri to Illinois to Indiana, totaling 350 km. This also made it the tornado with the longest path, which took about three and a half hours. During this time, it destroyed 15,000 homes, earning it a ranking of an EF-5. But with a maximum width of about 1.5 to 2.5 km, neither the Tri-State nor the Bridge Creek Tornadoes were the biggest tornadoes in history. The widest ever recorded reached an absolutely massive width of 4.2 km. This occurred around El Reno, Oklahoma on May 31, 2013 and lasted about 40 minutes. Luckily, it remained mainly in rural areas and was rated an EF-3. So while winds reached 484 km per hour, its damage was limited. Wide tornadoes aren't usually the deadliest. However, this one did result in the deaths of eight individuals, three of which were the first storm chasers ever to be killed in a tornado. These deadly events are a bone-chilling reminder of just how ruthless nature can be. For anyone who lives where tornadoes frequent, all they can hope for is a fair warning to get themselves somewhere safe. Currently, meteorologists can identify weather conditions that could result in a severe storm days in advance. But determining exactly when or where a tornado will form is much more difficult. A lot of that difficulty is due to the relatively small scale of a tornado. While storms can cover large areas, even multiple states, tornadoes are usually less than a kilometer wide. Once a storm forms, predicting a tornado becomes a lot easier. Using Doppler radar systems, meteorologists can watch a storm and provide a risk assessment for a certain area. Something like, there's a 20% chance of a tornado over these 40 kilometers. Most often, tornado warnings made by the National Weather Service turn out to be false alarms. This happens up to 80% of the time. Of course, it's always better to be safe than sorry, especially when you only have a few minutes to prepare when a tornado does end up forming. But can we do better? While most people would run from a tornado, it's a storm chaser's job to get in front of it. They set up scientific equipment along what they hope will be its path that will take important measurements as the tornado travels over it. As we've already discussed, there are still a lot of unknowns about how and why tornadoes form. But we know a lot more than we used to and that's thanks to these incredibly brave individuals, most of whom are meteorologists, including one of the storm chasers who lost his life in the El Reno tornado. His name was Tim Samaras and he was extremely passionate about his work. He once said that a ground-based measurement taken from within a tornado is especially crucial because it provides data about the lowest 10 meters of a tornado, where houses, vehicles, and people are. Other scientists have agreed that the rapidly changing conditions low to the ground may be what's controlling a tornado's formation. This data could not only help scientists to better understand tornadoes, but would improve their forecasts and help design structures that are able to withstand intense winds. But of course, making a technical instrument that can withstand these winds itself is no easy task and scientists had once given up on it. That was until May 7, 2002, when Tim Samaras deployed a probe of his own design that survived a direct hit from an EF3 tornado while recording changes in pressure, wind speed and direction, and air temperature and relative humidity. With this device, he and his team went on to collect video and data from inside several tornadoes, providing the scientific community with invaluable information. But collecting this data is just one piece of the puzzle and scientists are still developing better detection methods and warning systems. These include new types of radar technology, such as phased array radar, which can scan the entire sky in less than one minute, five times faster than current radar systems. Scientists are also building better forecast and prediction models. These use current weather and radar data to simulate what the atmosphere will look like in the future. To make them more accurate, scientists are trying to increase their resolution. Because not only are tornadoes small compared to thunderstorms, but what's happening inside a tornado, changes in temperature, pressure, humidity and wind, is occurring on the molecular level. And while a model of every molecule involved in a storm may not be possible right now, we may one day have the computing capacity to do so. But even if we are never able to predict a tornado days ahead of time, gaining just an hour's notice could save countless lives. To get up-to-date information on big storm events, almost everyone relies on the news. We've all anxiously tracked thunderstorms coming in to ruin our plans, or checked reports of how much damage a recent storm caused and what the government's plans are for aid and reconstruction. We've also all felt sorry for storm reporters getting blasted in the face by snow or clinging on for dear life as hurricane force wind pushes them around. When it comes to storm information, we all kind of assume the news will give it to us straight. But these days, in the world of sensationalism and competition for clicks, it's hard to know what's being overblown and what are the simple facts. With hundreds of news sources out there, it's downright annoying trying to sift through all the nonsense. This is why a good news aggregator app like Ground News is so helpful. It's an app I use every morning to understand the news in a quick, simple, unbiased way. Ground News is a website and app developed by a former NASA engineer on a mission to give readers an easy, data-driven, objective way to read the news. Every story comes with a quick, visual breakdown of the political bias, factuality, and ownership of the sources reporting, all backed by ratings from three independent news monitoring organizations. You can quickly swipe through the different headlines that different news outlets are giving to the same story. Sometimes the differences are subtle, other times not at all. You can also see which news outlets are choosing to ignore or under-report stories that are being widely reported elsewhere. For example, if you look up topics like tornadoes or climate change on Ground News, you can see that most stories receive far more left-leaning coverage. I sort of expected the climate change bias, but tornado coverage bias? Why? It gets even more biased when you click into stories like this one, about how the Democratic governor of Kentucky's efforts to help storm-torn areas might hurt the GOP advantage in rural areas. This story was reported on by 18 different outlets and has a 44% left-leaning coverage and a 0% right-leaning coverage. I know I'm going to get a thousand salty comments about my left-leaning bias even talking about this, but the truth is readers from any political leaning can identify media bias and check source credibility with Ground News. There's even a web browser extension that can show you the breakdown of how news outlets from across the political spectrum are reporting on the same story. This helps you immediately notice certain bias trends, which is helpful, but also fascinating. Seeing the different choice of words and headlines from different organizations, while also seeing their bias flagged, is a super effective way to see exactly how prominent and widespread news bias really is. It adds another layer of interest to reading the daily news. So if you're looking for a better way to stay informed about current events around the world, check out Ground News by visiting ground.news slash real science. The link is in the description. You can try it free or subscribe to get access to all the features you see here and support transparent, independent news. But Ground News is also offering all Real Science viewers a special 30% discount on their Vantage subscription, the top level subscription option. This includes access to a feature called My News Bias, which is basically a dashboard for your news diet. Sign up to see how your reading habits change over the next week. What are your top sources? Are you engaging with diverse perspectives? What about your favorite topics? This offer is only available at ground.news slash real science or by clicking the link in the video description.