A survivor's view from inside a tornado

Atmospheric scientist Perry Sampson was out in the Oklahoma field with his students, chasing a supercell thunderstorm, when the storm turned on him. "To our south, we see rotation," one of his students can be heard saying on a video from that day. Within moments, Sampson found himself inside a tornado, unable to see the car ahead of him, debris flying so thick he couldn't tell where the road was. "I think my God, if there's a collarist field, I've seen that movie. What a horrible way to die," he recalls thinking. He survived, and his story is a rare first-person account of what it is like to be inside one of nature's most violent phenomena — and why scientists keep chasing them anyway.

What makes a supercell thunderstorm

Supercell thunderstorms are not your run-of-the-mill storms. They are massive, rotating, and capable of producing the most destructive tornadoes. To create one, you need a specific set of conditions. First, there is convective instability: warm, muggy air near the ground wants to rise, but it is trapped under a layer of warmer, drier air about a mile up — what Sampson calls an inversion. "I like to think of it like seran wrap or jelly," he says. "It's like a heavy blanket on the smuggy air." All that muggy air is contained beneath that blanket.