Tornadoes have always made me nervous. When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Detroit in March of ’76, an F4 touched down in our city, and it was very scary. It was extremely rare for this sized tornado of this size to strike Michigan. So when I heard about this story, I paused.
Perry Samson, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Michigan, has seen the center of a monster. Not in some armored chase vehicle with a film crew — in a rental car, in northwest Kansas, with students scattered in nearby vehicles and a wall of debris so thick he couldn’t see his own hood.
Most people describe the sound of a tornado as like a freight train. Samson says it’s more like a thousand screaming jet engines. He’s one of the few people on Earth who has driven into a tornado and lived to tell the tale — and he’s emphatic about one thing: he never wants to do it again.
The Day the Sky Broke
Samson and his team were studying supercell thunderstorms — the kind that produce tornadoes — when the storm turned dark enough to require headlights in the middle of the day. A tornado formed and began bearing down on them.
The students escaped. Samson’s car was swallowed by a cloud of flying debris so thick that visibility dropped to zero. With his options disappearing, he made a desperate move: he turned the car directly into the wind, hoping the vehicle’s aerodynamics would keep it pinned to the ground rather than being flipped like a toy.
The physics worked — barely.
The Physics of Fear
When you’re inside a tornado’s vortex, your body experiences things the news cameras can’t capture:
The pressure change: A tornado is a localized area of rapidly changing pressure. Your ears don’t just “pop” — they ache, as if your head is being squeezed by giant hands.
The solid wind: Samson’s team measured wind speeds of almost 150 mph nearby, but inside the vortex, they were likely much higher. At those speeds, air hits you with the force of a solid object.
The soup of darkness: In movies, the “eye” is a clear space. In reality, it’s a debris ball — a brownish-black soup of pulverized soil, trees, and buildings. It was so dark that Samson’s camera couldn’t even register a picture.
Debris slammed into his windshield. Tornadoes can pick up fences, wood, and metal from buildings, tree branches, and even cows. Textbook advice says to get into a ditch so you’re lying flat and might be more protected from flying debris. But the wind was so violent, Samson couldn’t even open the car door.
He stayed low and prayed.
The Making of a Monster
How does such a severe storm even happen? It takes a perfect, violent recipe of atmospheric ingredients:
Fuel: A tornado needs warm, muggy air (water vapor) near the ground with dry air above it. This creates the potential for rising air — but only if the atmosphere is unstable enough to overcome “the cap”.
The cap: A thin “inversion” layer of stable air acts like a lid on that warm, moist air, bottling it up until the moist air punches through.
The dry line: The dry line is where warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and dry air from the west meet. The advancing hot, dry air is actually heavier than muggy air, and it pushes the moist air upward, disrupting the cap.
Wind shear: Surface winds from the south and upper winds from the west create a horizontal rolling motion in the atmosphere. When the air is pushed upward, that rotation becomes vertical, creating what’s known as a mesocyclone.
The jet stream: About 5 to 7 miles up, it is a fast-moving river of air. Disturbances within it can create areas that pull air upward from below and lower surface pressure.
Together, these ingredients can create the powerful, rotating vortex that you know as a tornado. These storms can have winds up to 300 mph and leave a long path of destruction, sometimes more than a mile wide. They can stay on the ground for seconds or many minutes, tearing apart buildings and trees in their path.
Where they will travel is hard to predict, so getting to safety should be a priority.
The Monster’s Lesson
When the storm passed, the silence was jarring. Samson’s rental car was mired in mud, the antenna was bent in half, and bits of straw were embedded in every single seam of the car’s body.
Tornadoes are extremely dangerous. Sixty-one people were killed by tornadoes in the U.S. in 2025, and many more were injured by flying debris. Make sure you know what to do when a tornado alert sounds — follow the alert’s advice and get to safety immediately.
When scientists chase storms, they are not trying to experience tornadoes — they are trying to measure the small-scale processes inside storms that cannot be observed in other ways. Many of the key processes that produce tornadoes occur within a few hundred meters of the ground and evolve over minutes, which means radars, satellites, and weather stations often miss them.
Seeing a tornado and the damage it causes is a powerful reminder that people are not in control of everything. It serves as a warning to be wise and ready for anything.
Sophisticated research using drones and radar is the smart way to study these monsters — seeing them from the inside is definitely not.