(CN) — It looks unreal, a Texas take on "The Wizard of Oz." Instead of Dorothy spinning in her tornado-launched home, a twister topples Riley Leon’s 2.5-ton pickup, spins it in a circle, then blows it upright. Leon speeds away, out of the frame of a storm chaser’s camera phone.
Leon, 16, suffered a lower back fracture but thanks to his seatbelt he survived the cyclone’s 130 mph winds, which knocked his Chevy truck over on a rural highway near Austin in March.
Scientists have documented an increase over the last 20 years of the frequency of tornadoes in the Southern states of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina.
And that’s troubling given the large number of manufactured homes in the region, lax codes that do not require them to be securely anchored to the ground, and the tendency of tornadoes to form at night when people are sleeping – fueled by warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico – rather than in the late afternoon or early evening, as they typically do in the Great Plains.
Against this backdrop, Leon’s experience is a lesson: driving through a tornado, bad idea; hunkering down in a manufactured home, even worse.
“A car is a little bit safer than a manufactured home, believe it or not. … You are strapped in. You have a seat belt, and you have safety precautions. You have airbags,” said Stephen Strader, a Villanova University professor focused on reducing risk from hazardous weather.
“When you don’t have a properly anchored manufactured home, the tornado comes along, picks up the entire structure and tosses it like a kite into the woods 100 yards away and you’re inside it,” he cautioned.
In the most harrowing experience of her life, Jennifer Henson-Collins turned to her faith.
Sheltering with her children in a hallway of her manufactured home in Cookeville, Tennessee, as an EF4 tornado spun into her backyard, she hollered prayers to God.
“The tornado picked us up with the hardwood floor and landed us 250 feet across the street! We lost everything! I could feel my guardian angel right behind us hovering over us to protect us. … We had minimum injuries. The scariest night of my life,” she wrote, in a “Tornado Survivor Stories” account she gave to the National Weather Service.
That twister was among an outbreak of more than a dozen nocturnal tornadoes that ravaged west and middle Tennessee on March 2 and 3, 2020, killing 25 people, injuring another 309 and causing $1.6 billion in property damage.
For scientists struggling to link changes in U.S. tornado patterns to climate change, such outbreaks underscore the difficulty of understanding this most enigmatic of weather events.
Even America’s most learned researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration admit their ignorance.
“How do tornadoes form? The truth is that we don’t fully understand,” the agency states in a “Severe Weather 101” primer on its website.
And while tornado clusters, when six or more form within hours of each other, are becoming more common, there are now fewer days on average throughout a year with tornadoes, about 100, than the 1970s, when there were about 150, despite better tools for detecting relatively weak tornadoes.
“The why is one of the great unknowns that I wish I knew the answer to,” said Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, who has been studying tornadoes since 1985.
Brooks described tornado formation as a balancing of ingredients. They are rotating thunderstorms. Thunderstorms develop when warm, moist air rises into cold, dry air, he explained.
“Now what makes that storm severe and likely to produce a tornado, it needs to form where the wind in the environment, the horizontal wind, increases with height over the lowest several miles,” Brooks continued.
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