Why the Inside of a Tornado Feels Freezing, Leaving You Struggling for Breath

On a June afternoon in 1955, a massive tornado roared through central Nebraska, heading down the North Platte River towards Scottsbluff. According to an article in the meteorological journal Monthly Weather Review, three journalists from a radio station's mobile unit spotted the funnel north of town. In a bid to escape, they drove into a nearby cemetery, but were stopped by a locked gate. With no way out, they abandoned their vehicle, leaving the radio transmitter running so that listeners could hear the storm's ferocity, and sought shelter in the basement of a stone building.

The three broadcasters huddled together near the furnace in the basement, anxiously waiting for the tornado's arrival. Soon, strange events unfolded. First, tools like shovels and rakes were pulled up the ramp into the basement. Then, darkness and a deafening roar engulfed them, and the furnace twisted violently. For a few minutes, they were seemingly inside the vortex of the tornado itself. Suddenly, the temperature dropped dramatically — from a warm summer afternoon to an unexpectedly chilly cold. They also struggled to breathe due to the thinning air. Fortunately, after what felt like an eternity, the tornado's roar faded, and they emerged from the building, which had only minimal damage while surrounding structures were destroyed. Here's some rare footage of that very storm:

The broadcasters' remarkable tale of survival and fortune left scientists puzzled for years. What caused the air within the tornado's vortex to be colder and thinner than the surrounding atmosphere?

Over sixty years later, research by Georgios Vatistas, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, along with his graduate students Badwal Gurpreet Singh and Rahul Rampal, sheds light on the mystery.

Vatistas has spent over 25 years studying intense vortices, both natural and man-made, and recently refined his mathematical model to incorporate factors like density variation and turbulence effects.

"We came across the 1955 tornado while searching for similar phenomena to test our theoretical findings," he shares via email.

According to a Concordia press release, the team applied their new model and discovered that as air pockets—regions of air with lower pressure than the surrounding atmosphere—travel from the vortex’s edge toward its center, they expand. This expansion lowers the air temperature and makes it thinner. The more the pockets expand, the colder and thinner the air becomes. In the case of the 1955 tornado, the temperature plummeted from 80.6°F (27°C) to 53.6°F (12°C), and the air’s density was 20% lower than that found at high-altitude mountain peaks, where climbers require special equipment to breathe. This explains why the broadcasters felt cold and struggled to breathe.

"Fortunately, the tornado passed quickly," says Vatistas. "Its center was just 100 feet from the shelter at the storm’s peak, so the broadcasters avoided any serious physiological effects. Others have survived tornadoes, but we couldn’t find similarly detailed accounts."

Vatistas explains that the new modeling method, outlined in a recent paper published in the Journal of Aircraft of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, will aid researchers in studying intense atmospheric vortices like tornadoes and waterspouts. It should also serve as a valuable engineering tool for enhancing vortex refrigeration tubes used in industrial processes and cooling electronic components.

"Tornadoes still have many secrets to reveal," he writes. "I hope this tool will help uncover more of these mysteries, either by us or by others."