But no one knows precisely when or where a thunderstorm is going to shoot down a funnel with winds that can exceed 200 miles an hour, powerful enough to rip houses from foundations and shred mobile homes. Nor can forecasters tell how far a tornado will travel, wreaking havoc and destroying lives. The series of devastating tornadoes that swept through central Florida on Monday appeared so quickly that few had time to take cover. Tornadoes are violently rotating columns of air, some as narrow as a rope and others as wide as a ballpark. Even on a hot summer day they can bring on night, with clouds so dark they turn street lights on.
Survivors tell of roaring winds, the helplessness, the terror.
And then as quickly as tornadoes strike, they move on. Erik Rasmussen was a young boy when he rode his bike to the outskirts of his Kansas community to watch an approaching storm, and he never got over it. Today, he is a scientist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., and he still chases tornadoes. He uses the basic tool that Kruse and his colleagues tested years ago in Colorado. For several summers now, Rasmussen and his team have collected warehouses full of data, and it will take years to analyze it all.