--- title: Bryan Walsh: Why Tornadoes are So Hard to Predict | TIME description: TIME's Bryan Walsh explains why tornadoes happen, why they're so hard to predict, and whether climate change has an effect. canonical: https://time.com/video/DnGe1sm1/ og:title: Bryan Walsh: Why Tornadoes are So Hard to Predict og:description: TIME's Bryan Walsh explains why tornadoes happen, why they're so hard to predict, and whether climate change has an effect. og:url: https://time.com/video/DnGe1sm1/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/DnGe1sm1/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Bryan Walsh: Why Tornadoes are So Hard to Predict twitter:description: TIME's Bryan Walsh explains why tornadoes happen, why they're so hard to predict, and whether climate change has an effect. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/DnGe1sm1/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Bryan Walsh: Why Tornadoes are So Hard to Predict > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Bryan Walsh: Why Tornadoes are So Hard to Predict [Watch (HLS stream): Bryan Walsh: Why Tornadoes are So Hard to Predict](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/DnGe1sm1.m3u8) (2:09)  _Published 2013-05-21. TIME's Bryan Walsh explains why tornadoes happen, why they're so hard to predict, and whether climate change has an effect._ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:35 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Get Hard Trailer](/video/72Eh5ScB/) ### Get Hard Trailer [TIME_BryanCranston_current](/video/TLRau4Ei/) ### TIME\_BryanCranston\_current [TIME's 2013 Oscar Predictions](/video/S7fnEjC7/) ### TIME's 2013 Oscar Predictions --- ## Transcript Yesterday an EF4 tornado, one with winds of nearly 200 miles per hour, struck the area of Moore, Oklahoma. It killed at least 51 people, possibly far more. We're looking at the factors that cause tornadoes and whether we can get better at actually predicting them. That is a tornado, There it is, it's right there on the ground. That's the clearest defined, or definition that we've seen from the air. The National Weather Service was able to warn people in Moore about 16 minutes before the tornado actually hit, which actually is more time than would have been given in the past but really just barely enough time for people to get to shelters. The tornado also hit around 3pm which is rush hour, so it was really the worst time a tornado could possibly hit. You had children still in schools. You got a lot of people on the roads. Just really not a lot of time to get to the kind of shelters, underground, safety areas you need to really avoid being hurt in a tornado. Of course, forecasters are working hard. They're trying to study how a tornado forms. They're trying to get data from the storms themselves. But that's really tricky because a, a tornado is incredibly powerful, not a place you necessarily want to be if you're a scientist. But also, they're hard to predict, so they're hard to find them, you know? There's a reason why storm chasing is such a wild profession. You actually have to look to find them, hope you actually get there, and then withstand those amazing factors. So that makes them really hard to model, hard to study. We know, of course, roughly where they'll hit. 75 % of all tornadoes in the world hit in the United States, and nearly all of them hit in an area called the Tornado Belt which is, goes about north Texas through Oklahoma, that sort of part of the midwest. You have very cold, dry air coming down from the Rocky Mountains and it meets very warm, moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. That sort of collision is what can cause a tornado. Scientists really aren't sure what impact climate change may be having on tornadoes. You look back in the past, you really don't see any kind of trend. As temperatures getting warmer, are you seeing more tornadoes, are you seeing less, are they stronger or are they weaker? A, and that's really because it seems as if climate change can amplify one aspect of tornadoes, but decrease another. The result seems to be a wash as far as we can tell right now. So we don't know into the future, as temperatures do get warm, will we see tornadoes like Moore, Oklahoma, happen more often? 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