WEBVTT - Short Stuff: Tornado Alley

0:00:04.240 --> 0:00:06.280
<v Speaker 1>Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and

0:00:06.320 --> 0:00:08.720
<v Speaker 1>there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, sitting in for Dave,

0:00:08.800 --> 0:00:11.760
<v Speaker 1>and this is stuff you should know Short Stuff.

0:00:12.440 --> 0:00:15.440
<v Speaker 2>That's right, we're talking about tornadoes again on the show.

0:00:15.840 --> 0:00:19.639
<v Speaker 2>We've talked plenty about tornadoes and Tornado Alley even but

0:00:19.640 --> 0:00:22.160
<v Speaker 2>we're gonna talk more about it because probably since we

0:00:22.200 --> 0:00:25.159
<v Speaker 2>did the last update on Tornado Alley, it seems like

0:00:25.200 --> 0:00:26.200
<v Speaker 2>it might be changing.

0:00:26.000 --> 0:00:28.480
<v Speaker 1>A bit, right, Yeah, definitely for sure, and just even

0:00:28.960 --> 0:00:32.360
<v Speaker 1>classifying tornadoes. I'm sure we talked about the changeover because

0:00:32.440 --> 0:00:34.920
<v Speaker 1>it would have happened before we talked about it, but

0:00:35.000 --> 0:00:37.440
<v Speaker 1>it would have been really new. So yeah, there's a

0:00:37.440 --> 0:00:41.600
<v Speaker 1>lot to dig into about Tornado Alley and tornadoes. One

0:00:41.640 --> 0:00:44.160
<v Speaker 1>of the first things to understand is that Tornado Alley

0:00:44.680 --> 0:00:49.720
<v Speaker 1>is a contested area of the United States of North America,

0:00:50.360 --> 0:00:54.240
<v Speaker 1>but the United States in particular that runs essentially from Texas.

0:00:54.680 --> 0:00:58.320
<v Speaker 1>Why are you laughing at me? Just runs?

0:00:58.440 --> 0:01:01.520
<v Speaker 2>I love it to bear with this. When you dig

0:01:01.520 --> 0:01:04.720
<v Speaker 2>yourself into a word hole then climb back out.

0:01:04.560 --> 0:01:07.160
<v Speaker 1>Of it, well watch this, I'm climbing up. It starts

0:01:07.160 --> 0:01:09.800
<v Speaker 1>in Texas, it goes all the way up to the Dakotas,

0:01:10.480 --> 0:01:16.080
<v Speaker 1>but it also veers over, it bends and hits like Iowa, Indiana, Ohio.

0:01:16.680 --> 0:01:19.920
<v Speaker 1>And this the reason this is considered tornado Alley is

0:01:19.920 --> 0:01:23.760
<v Speaker 1>because it has the most tornadoes of anywhere else in

0:01:23.800 --> 0:01:27.080
<v Speaker 1>the United States, which means that it has more tornadoes

0:01:27.120 --> 0:01:30.200
<v Speaker 1>than anywhere else in the world. And the reason that

0:01:30.360 --> 0:01:33.400
<v Speaker 1>is is because it has the perfect conditions for tornadoes

0:01:33.400 --> 0:01:34.320
<v Speaker 1>to develop.

0:01:35.160 --> 0:01:39.120
<v Speaker 2>All Right, So tornado producing conditions that you mentioned are

0:01:39.959 --> 0:01:44.160
<v Speaker 2>they form through instability in the atmosphere. So a lot

0:01:44.160 --> 0:01:48.200
<v Speaker 2>of moist, warm air beneath that cooler, dryer air, and

0:01:48.240 --> 0:01:50.640
<v Speaker 2>then something called wind sheer. It's just when winds are

0:01:52.120 --> 0:01:55.320
<v Speaker 2>changing with height, like the winds are changing and then

0:01:55.360 --> 0:01:58.840
<v Speaker 2>they're changing at different height levels. And if you've got that,

0:01:59.240 --> 0:02:01.480
<v Speaker 2>then you've got a pretty good recipe for a tornado.

0:02:01.560 --> 0:02:03.360
<v Speaker 2>And it just so happens that those states that you

0:02:03.400 --> 0:02:07.680
<v Speaker 2>mentioned have a lot of that kind of weather happening

0:02:08.040 --> 0:02:09.160
<v Speaker 2>thanks to where they are.

0:02:09.200 --> 0:02:12.120
<v Speaker 1>Basically, yeah, so warm moist air comes up from the

0:02:12.120 --> 0:02:16.519
<v Speaker 1>Gulf of Mexico and cooler, dryer air comes from the west,

0:02:16.600 --> 0:02:19.880
<v Speaker 1>like say the Rockies, and they converge in that area

0:02:19.919 --> 0:02:22.520
<v Speaker 1>that's Tornado Alley. And when you've got those two factors,

0:02:22.560 --> 0:02:26.079
<v Speaker 1>like you said, the wind shear and the instability, supercell

0:02:26.200 --> 0:02:30.480
<v Speaker 1>thunderstorms can break out and that's what spawned tornadoes. And

0:02:30.560 --> 0:02:34.320
<v Speaker 1>so anywhere you find that where there's instability and wind shear,

0:02:35.720 --> 0:02:37.880
<v Speaker 1>a tornado can break out. And they do break out

0:02:38.000 --> 0:02:42.160
<v Speaker 1>outside a tornado alley all the time, bad ones, yeah,

0:02:42.200 --> 0:02:45.880
<v Speaker 1>for sure. And yeah, it's not even North America. There's

0:02:45.919 --> 0:02:49.040
<v Speaker 1>a long standing myth that we probably talked about about

0:02:49.080 --> 0:02:52.160
<v Speaker 1>whether there's tornadoes outside of North America, and there are,

0:02:52.880 --> 0:02:56.079
<v Speaker 1>but it's just that there's so many more in North America.

0:02:56.400 --> 0:02:59.040
<v Speaker 1>You can forgive people for thinking they're just a North

0:02:59.080 --> 0:03:00.000
<v Speaker 1>American phenomenon.

0:03:00.080 --> 0:03:03.120
<v Speaker 2>Then yeah, And the other thing too, is in the

0:03:03.200 --> 0:03:05.480
<v Speaker 2>areas that you described as tornado alley, at least a

0:03:05.480 --> 0:03:08.120
<v Speaker 2>lot of them have these big, wide open planes, and

0:03:08.160 --> 0:03:10.720
<v Speaker 2>that's just kind of become the common thing you think

0:03:10.760 --> 0:03:13.360
<v Speaker 2>about is a tornado that you see way far off

0:03:13.400 --> 0:03:17.440
<v Speaker 2>in the distance coming at you. And that's not always

0:03:17.480 --> 0:03:19.720
<v Speaker 2>the case when they happen here in the American South,

0:03:19.760 --> 0:03:21.200
<v Speaker 2>which you know, we'll get to the fact that that

0:03:21.360 --> 0:03:24.920
<v Speaker 2>happens a lot more lately, there are a lot more trees,

0:03:25.040 --> 0:03:27.440
<v Speaker 2>dense forests, it's not these big, wide open planes. So

0:03:27.919 --> 0:03:30.960
<v Speaker 2>it's just not what you typically think of as tornado country,

0:03:31.440 --> 0:03:35.000
<v Speaker 2>even though they will rip through Georgia or Alabama or

0:03:35.080 --> 0:03:38.360
<v Speaker 2>Tennessee just as well as they can anywhere else.

0:03:38.560 --> 0:03:42.360
<v Speaker 1>Yes, and then we should also say that tornado alley

0:03:42.640 --> 0:03:45.280
<v Speaker 1>is a fairly recent term. It was coined in nineteen

0:03:45.320 --> 0:03:48.720
<v Speaker 1>fifty two by a pair of Air Force weathercasters, Major

0:03:48.840 --> 0:03:53.800
<v Speaker 1>Ernest J. Faubush great name agreed, and Captain Robert C. Miller.

0:03:54.480 --> 0:03:57.320
<v Speaker 1>And they I saw that their method of predicting tornadoes

0:03:57.440 --> 0:04:00.960
<v Speaker 1>was like ninety five percent accurate or something insane likely whoa.

0:04:01.040 --> 0:04:04.600
<v Speaker 1>But so the coin tornado alley at about the same

0:04:04.720 --> 0:04:08.560
<v Speaker 1>time the records of tracking tornadoes begin, because in the

0:04:08.640 --> 0:04:12.839
<v Speaker 1>United States, our records are tornado activity records only date

0:04:12.880 --> 0:04:13.880
<v Speaker 1>back to the fifties.

0:04:14.720 --> 0:04:18.719
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the nineteen fifties. In fact, it was I guess

0:04:18.760 --> 0:04:21.080
<v Speaker 2>just before we started the podcast in two thousand and

0:04:21.080 --> 0:04:24.360
<v Speaker 2>seven that they and I guess I remember talking about

0:04:24.400 --> 0:04:25.760
<v Speaker 2>this being sort of a new thing at the time.

0:04:25.800 --> 0:04:29.880
<v Speaker 2>Like you said, the Enhanced Fujiita Scale or the EF

0:04:29.920 --> 0:04:35.080
<v Speaker 2>scale for rating a tornadoes intensity or their damage intensity.

0:04:35.600 --> 0:04:39.240
<v Speaker 2>So that hasn't even been around that long. But you

0:04:39.279 --> 0:04:41.840
<v Speaker 2>know how it generally worked was if you're going to

0:04:41.920 --> 0:04:45.000
<v Speaker 2>count tornadoes, you're literally gonna do that. You're gonna have

0:04:45.040 --> 0:04:47.640
<v Speaker 2>people calling in to the Weather Service. You're going to

0:04:47.720 --> 0:04:50.800
<v Speaker 2>have just regular citizens. You're going to maybe people in

0:04:50.839 --> 0:04:54.839
<v Speaker 2>the government or meteorologists weighing in, but people reporting tornadoes

0:04:55.400 --> 0:04:57.960
<v Speaker 2>to the NWS is how they keep track of how

0:04:58.000 --> 0:04:59.080
<v Speaker 2>many tornadoes they are.

0:04:59.360 --> 0:05:02.839
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, you just know that the citizens that report tornadoes,

0:05:02.880 --> 0:05:05.240
<v Speaker 1>there's only ten of them, but they're probably responsible for

0:05:05.279 --> 0:05:07.400
<v Speaker 1>like sixty percent of the tornado reports.

0:05:07.760 --> 0:05:08.640
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they're into it.

0:05:08.760 --> 0:05:10.920
<v Speaker 1>I mean, good for them. So you don't just take

0:05:10.960 --> 0:05:13.680
<v Speaker 1>those ten people's word for it. Like you mark where

0:05:13.680 --> 0:05:15.800
<v Speaker 1>they're saying they saw a tornado, and then you send

0:05:15.839 --> 0:05:19.520
<v Speaker 1>out train meteorologists to go check afterwards, see what kind of.

0:05:19.640 --> 0:05:20.480
<v Speaker 3>Structure was there.

0:05:20.960 --> 0:05:25.440
<v Speaker 1>Exactly put their hand on a railroad track and they

0:05:25.839 --> 0:05:28.520
<v Speaker 1>look at the destruction and based on the level of destruction,

0:05:28.960 --> 0:05:32.440
<v Speaker 1>they categorize it with that enhance Fujiita scale, and that

0:05:32.640 --> 0:05:36.080
<v Speaker 1>ultimately what they're after is classifying it based on presumed

0:05:36.160 --> 0:05:40.080
<v Speaker 1>or estimated wind speeds hence the destructiveness of the whole thing,

0:05:40.240 --> 0:05:43.600
<v Speaker 1>and then they count it. And that's how they track tornadoes.

0:05:43.640 --> 0:05:46.360
<v Speaker 1>And because it's only in only days back to the fifties,

0:05:46.400 --> 0:05:49.200
<v Speaker 1>and it's still kind of a cluegye way of tracking tornadoes.

0:05:49.400 --> 0:05:54.320
<v Speaker 1>We're not very good at looking at long term trends

0:05:54.360 --> 0:05:58.159
<v Speaker 1>in tornado activity. We're not there yet, so we're kind

0:05:58.160 --> 0:05:59.720
<v Speaker 1>of reading tea leaves as it were.

0:06:00.800 --> 0:06:02.960
<v Speaker 2>All Right, uh now I want to go have some tea,

0:06:03.000 --> 0:06:05.360
<v Speaker 2>So let's take a break. Okay, and we'll be right back.

0:06:05.880 --> 0:06:24.400
<v Speaker 3>Okay, definitely should now dumb now large oils of Ryan.

0:06:26.040 --> 0:06:31.080
<v Speaker 1>Sk Okay, chuck the lake. We said, you can have

0:06:31.120 --> 0:06:35.920
<v Speaker 1>a tornado outside of Tornado Alley. Sorry, everybody. They just

0:06:35.960 --> 0:06:39.080
<v Speaker 1>happened there with more frequency. There's also plenty of less

0:06:39.080 --> 0:06:44.720
<v Speaker 1>powerful tornadoes too that happened in Tornado Alley. But they're

0:06:44.800 --> 0:06:47.600
<v Speaker 1>also they seem to be also popping up in the

0:06:47.920 --> 0:06:53.039
<v Speaker 1>southern southeastern US with much greater frequency and much more

0:06:53.080 --> 0:06:56.280
<v Speaker 1>destructiveness than it seems like there used to be. And

0:06:56.320 --> 0:06:59.320
<v Speaker 1>that's actually a point of contention. Not everybody agrees with that,

0:06:59.640 --> 0:07:02.280
<v Speaker 1>but they're there's a thought that there's a school of

0:07:02.320 --> 0:07:06.640
<v Speaker 1>thought that Tornado Alley's migrating east toward.

0:07:07.320 --> 0:07:12.119
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they're calling this new new Tornado Alley Dixie Alley.

0:07:12.160 --> 0:07:14.480
<v Speaker 2>Some people are calling it that. Other people are saying like, no,

0:07:14.600 --> 0:07:17.440
<v Speaker 2>that's not even a thing. And again, these are the

0:07:17.480 --> 0:07:20.000
<v Speaker 2>ones that are going maybe through a forest or something,

0:07:20.040 --> 0:07:22.160
<v Speaker 2>or in the case of Atlanta, that one year like

0:07:22.280 --> 0:07:25.080
<v Speaker 2>in the city of Atlanta, which is very scary and weird.

0:07:26.360 --> 0:07:28.880
<v Speaker 2>But there's not really a tornado season like you think

0:07:28.880 --> 0:07:31.480
<v Speaker 2>of in traditional tornado alley. They can they can pop

0:07:31.560 --> 0:07:34.240
<v Speaker 2>up whenever. I think it's more likely here in the

0:07:34.280 --> 0:07:37.160
<v Speaker 2>South to have a tornado in late winter to early spring,

0:07:37.200 --> 0:07:41.760
<v Speaker 2>and in the northern plains it's usually summertime. But all

0:07:41.800 --> 0:07:44.360
<v Speaker 2>you need and these are what the meteorologists in tornado

0:07:44.400 --> 0:07:47.560
<v Speaker 2>people try to hammer home. It's like, yeah, maybe there's

0:07:47.560 --> 0:07:50.520
<v Speaker 2>a tornado season, you know, quote unquote season, but like

0:07:50.880 --> 0:07:53.720
<v Speaker 2>it's an atmospheric condition and that can happen at any

0:07:53.760 --> 0:07:57.320
<v Speaker 2>time in any place really as long as those conditions are.

0:07:57.200 --> 0:08:00.640
<v Speaker 1>Met right exactly. So like you said, so people are

0:08:00.680 --> 0:08:03.040
<v Speaker 1>just like, no, that's not actually a thing. It's not

0:08:03.080 --> 0:08:06.040
<v Speaker 1>really moving. The reason that a lot of people say

0:08:06.040 --> 0:08:08.679
<v Speaker 1>it's moving is because the climate change. It just makes

0:08:08.720 --> 0:08:13.040
<v Speaker 1>sense right that as the earth warms, if you need warmer,

0:08:13.160 --> 0:08:19.040
<v Speaker 1>humid air underneath colder air to create instability and wind cheer. Well,

0:08:19.080 --> 0:08:20.720
<v Speaker 1>then is the earth warms, you're going to have more

0:08:20.840 --> 0:08:25.400
<v Speaker 1>warmer humid air, and so yes, if so facto, tornadoes

0:08:25.440 --> 0:08:28.520
<v Speaker 1>are going to be breaking out much worse than they

0:08:28.520 --> 0:08:32.040
<v Speaker 1>were before, much greater frequency, and probably in places that

0:08:32.200 --> 0:08:35.160
<v Speaker 1>you know, you might as well say tornado alleys expanded. Right,

0:08:36.360 --> 0:08:40.760
<v Speaker 1>other people are like, not so fast, their buster, because yes,

0:08:40.800 --> 0:08:45.640
<v Speaker 1>there probably will be warmer, more warm, humid air, but

0:08:46.160 --> 0:08:49.240
<v Speaker 1>because the Earth's warming, that also means there will probably

0:08:49.280 --> 0:08:53.640
<v Speaker 1>be less cooler, drier air. Right, So you'll have one

0:08:53.720 --> 0:08:57.000
<v Speaker 1>of the ingredients, but you'll have less of the other ingredient,

0:08:57.360 --> 0:09:00.080
<v Speaker 1>so you'll have less wind cheer, which means that. But

0:09:00.400 --> 0:09:02.360
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, it might be a wash. And at

0:09:02.360 --> 0:09:04.839
<v Speaker 1>the very least, we can't really predict at this point

0:09:05.040 --> 0:09:08.600
<v Speaker 1>how climate change is going to affect tornadoes. So sit down,

0:09:09.240 --> 0:09:11.079
<v Speaker 1>I think, guess what the other scientists are saying.

0:09:11.640 --> 0:09:14.480
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's kind of hard to believe after all this

0:09:14.520 --> 0:09:17.480
<v Speaker 2>time that this is as far along as we are

0:09:17.520 --> 0:09:20.640
<v Speaker 2>with tornadoes, And I don't know, it just seems like

0:09:20.720 --> 0:09:24.160
<v Speaker 2>something that you could almost predict it at a certain point.

0:09:24.640 --> 0:09:27.719
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, because we've been tracking them for a while. This

0:09:27.960 --> 0:09:31.920
<v Speaker 1>how stuff works article that we're basing this on mentions

0:09:32.280 --> 0:09:36.000
<v Speaker 1>what probably the very first report by a European of

0:09:36.040 --> 0:09:39.760
<v Speaker 1>a tornado in what would become the United States was

0:09:39.800 --> 0:09:43.160
<v Speaker 1>by Governor John Winthrop, one of the Puritans. If you

0:09:43.240 --> 0:09:46.240
<v Speaker 1>remember our Puritan episode, Oh yeah, yeah, I'm back in

0:09:46.320 --> 0:09:50.840
<v Speaker 1>sixteen forty three. He recorded a powerful wind that whipped

0:09:50.880 --> 0:09:54.800
<v Speaker 1>up dust, lifted his meeting house that's probably the big giveaway,

0:09:55.200 --> 0:09:57.320
<v Speaker 1>and knock down a tree that fell on some poor

0:09:57.360 --> 0:10:00.600
<v Speaker 1>schmo who was killed by it.

0:10:00.720 --> 0:10:01.120
<v Speaker 3>Geez.

0:10:01.320 --> 0:10:05.240
<v Speaker 2>So he said in his logbook tornadoes not so pure

0:10:05.679 --> 0:10:08.720
<v Speaker 2>exactly or very pure, depending on how you look at it.

0:10:08.760 --> 0:10:10.800
<v Speaker 1>I guess yeah, now that you mentioned it, you probably

0:10:10.800 --> 0:10:14.040
<v Speaker 1>saw them as God's wrath for sure. Do you have

0:10:14.040 --> 0:10:14.600
<v Speaker 1>anything else?

0:10:15.400 --> 0:10:19.280
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, we should mention the movie Twisters, because that is

0:10:19.320 --> 0:10:21.920
<v Speaker 2>a I guess, I don't know what they call him

0:10:21.960 --> 0:10:24.480
<v Speaker 2>these days, but not a remake of the original Twister movie.

0:10:25.280 --> 0:10:27.679
<v Speaker 2>But it has long been known that Emily, my wife,

0:10:28.600 --> 0:10:32.160
<v Speaker 2>loves the movie Twister, the first one one of her

0:10:32.280 --> 0:10:36.280
<v Speaker 2>guilty indulgences, because otherwise she just basically likes independent film

0:10:37.160 --> 0:10:39.560
<v Speaker 2>and foreign film and Twister, and that's always sort of

0:10:39.559 --> 0:10:41.840
<v Speaker 2>been the joke in the family. But she was very

0:10:41.840 --> 0:10:45.640
<v Speaker 2>excited to watch Twisters. We rented it the other night

0:10:45.760 --> 0:10:48.200
<v Speaker 2>here at the house. The three of us watched it,

0:10:48.800 --> 0:10:52.160
<v Speaker 2>and Twisters gets three big old thumbs down from Oh

0:10:52.240 --> 0:10:55.200
<v Speaker 2>that's a shame, just not very good unfortunately.

0:10:55.720 --> 0:10:56.240
<v Speaker 3>Well, it's a.

0:10:56.200 --> 0:10:58.840
<v Speaker 1>Tough act to follow. I mean the first first one

0:10:59.080 --> 0:10:59.800
<v Speaker 1>was pretty great.

0:11:00.559 --> 0:11:03.520
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean the cast alone, Philip Seymour Hoffman and

0:11:03.600 --> 0:11:07.480
<v Speaker 2>Bill Paxton and Helen Han it was great. Carry ol wise,

0:11:07.640 --> 0:11:10.679
<v Speaker 2>really just a top notch movie and holds up. So

0:11:11.640 --> 0:11:16.480
<v Speaker 2>I say, don't waste your time with Twisters. Okay, And

0:11:16.520 --> 0:11:18.240
<v Speaker 2>I hope no one that made that movie or was

0:11:18.240 --> 0:11:21.400
<v Speaker 2>in that movie listens to the show because they're all great. Otherwise,

0:11:21.880 --> 0:11:22.319
<v Speaker 2>good for.

0:11:22.320 --> 0:11:25.800
<v Speaker 1>You, man. Chuck was very nice at the end there,

0:11:25.840 --> 0:11:27.840
<v Speaker 1>So of course that means short stuff is out.

0:11:31.200 --> 0:11:34.080
<v Speaker 2>Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For

0:11:34.160 --> 0:11:38.360
<v Speaker 2>more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

0:11:38.480 --> 0:11:40.319
<v Speaker 2>or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.