Update: After weeks in the Midwest the 23 Degrees team finally catch a tornado!

Distance travelled ~ 442'521'600 km: day 172

The team were pleased late yesterday (June 20 2011) afternoon to finally catch sight of a tornado

Right at the end of our last day here, the wait finally paid off. We were driving in the convoy of radar trucks towards a storm system, which looked to us exactly the same as the others we'd seen, and a calm voice on the radio said "tornado at 1 o'clock". We drove up and over a slight hill and suddenly the grey sky in front of us resolved itself into an enormous dark tower, moving sideways across the road in front of us. It was probably a mile or so away, and we were all overwhelmed by just how massive it was. The photos don't do justice to the scale of it. We hopped out of the car and started filming, but after only 3 or 4 minutes, the tornado started to shrink, and had soon vanished. It had looked so solid and substantial, but what we were looking at was just the low-pressure core of the rotating storm. When the pressure drops enough, the moisture in the air will condense and so a tornado is a part of the cloud reaching down to the ground. But if the pressure rises just slightly, all that water will evaporate again, and that huge structure will vanish. And so our tornado evaporated, and the core became invisible again.

We drove down the road, to the place where the tornado had crossed it. There were ploughed fields on either side, and you could see the churned up soil where the tornado had passed across one field, across the road, through the field on the other side and over to a cluster of trees about half a mile away. We looked at a couple of trees next to the road, a short distance from the track. 15 minutes before, these had been healthy trees, but now they were ripped apart, and there was a really strong smell of sap to remind us how recently they'd been shredded.

There was no doubt in any of our minds that it had been worth the wait, and we felt very lucky to have been there for the short time the tornado had touched down. Seeing the destruction was sobering, and it brought home how much energy is swirling around in the atmosphere above us. A tornado is a reminder of how our atmosphere can be simmering away and still be almost completely invisible, until a threshold is crossed and a really destructive storm results.

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