Wind: The Invisible Force Wild Weather with Richard Hammond

Weather. One of the most astonishing forces on Earth.

Capable of both devastating power and spectacular beauty.

Wherever you live on the planet, weather shapes your world.

Yet for most of us, how it works is a mystery.

To really understand weather, you have to get inside it.

So I'm going to strip weather back to basics.

All in the name of science.

'Uncovering its secrets in a series of brave...

'..ambitious...

'and sometimes just plain unlikely experiments.'

Well, it certainly feels like a dust storm from here.

'To show you weather like you've never seen it before.'

There is a powerful invisible force

that moves around us almost unnoticed.

A force that drives almost all the extreme weather on our planet.

That force...

is wind.

WIND HOWLS

'In this programme, I'll discover

'how wind creates that extreme weather.

'What it's capable of...

'and just how fast it can go.'

Whoa!

'Along the way I'll attempt to measure the speed of a tornado,

'right next to the ground...'

Oh! That's huge!

'I'll create a whirlwind made of fire to discover how a wind

'becomes a spinning wind.

'And I'll become one of the few people in history

'to deliberately walk into the middle of a twister.'

I'm going in.

This is said to be the place with the worst weather in the world.

A place so forbidding that only the fearless

or the foolhardy would want to experience it.

So, hazard a guess where we're starting.

This is Mount Washington,

in the unlikely location of New Hampshire, USA.

You wouldn't expect extreme weather to be found in New England

but on April 12th, 1934,

Mount Washington weather station

measured one of the fastest wind speeds ever recorded on land.

231mph.

In fact, winds here hit hurricane force more than 100 days a year.

Now, bear that in mind during the next couple of minutes.

Because I'm about to take a little walk outside.

OK, just popping out.

Which is, it turns out, quite a chore out here.

I can not only hear the wind around this building, I can feel it.

The whole place is vibrating.

Oh, no! I've forgotten my goggles.

This is... This is the...

Do it in the wrong order and you just, right,

your eyeballs can freeze, any exposed skin,

you'll have frostbite on it within two or three minutes.

Right, that's my best hat, I won't get cold with that on.

This is to stop my nose falling off, which would be bad because

I'd never be able to wear sunglasses again and I want to.

Liner gloves.

Mittens.

OK.

Obviously, I am now obliged by law to say,

"I'm going outside. I might be some time."

I mean, that's how cold it is indoors!

At this point, I think I should try and give you some idea...

of what I might be in for with a small demonstration.

The lightest wind you can feel on your face

is about 5mph.

Enough to rustle this newspaper.

15mph and your umbrella gives up the ghost.

25mph can cause a deckchair to set sail.

Followed at 30mph by your garden furniture.

45 and all hell starts to break loose.

Seemingly rigid structures suddenly make a break for it.

And at 55mph, even small buildings are on the move.

So, why am I telling you all this?

Because on Mount Washington, it's currently 65.

With gusts reaching a staggering 85mph.

Believe it or not, I'm actually sheltered at the moment.

There's hardly any wind right here

because I'm in the lee of the building.

It starts about six feet that way

and then there's a lot of it and the only way to demonstrate it is

I'm going to go and stand in it.

And for reasons best known to themselves, Brendan and Sean,

on camera and sound, have decided to come with me

because they're idiots.

So, here we go, right, walking.

Not windy, not windy...

Getting windy...

This is about 65, maybe 70mph worth of wind,

but don't forget this is the site of one of the highest wind speeds

ever recorded by man, 231mph.

How must that feel? I'd be gone!

They do a calculation around these parts

where you take your weight in pounds,

I don't know what I am, it's about 150, 160.

Halve it, that's the wind speed

at which you're going to get into trouble,

which is about this wind speed.

There are three major storm systems that meet right here,

sort of long-distance weather patterns,

and that corner behind me is the most exposed place.

Which should make that the windiest spot on this whole mountain.

But lots of places have storm systems.

Why is it here that's so windy?

Don't worry about this, they said it was just a precaution.

So, take my hat, the one that caused this in the first place.

Let's pretend this is Mount Washington,

this desk fan is the wind

and we can see the wind hitting the top of the mountain.

Mount Washington is the highest thing for miles around.

So, although there are hills here

and here, and...

a town here...

and a ski resort there...

they make no difference to the wind hitting Mount Washington,

they're not high enough as obstacles to block it or disrupt its flow.

So, any wind there is will hit the top of the mountain.

But there's another reason why it's so windy up there

and it's complicated enough to demand a clipboard.

All our weather happens in the troposphere,

the first 11 miles or so of our atmosphere.

And the top of that layer acts as a sort of ceiling.

You know what it's like when you squeeze the end of a garden hose

and the water comes out more powerfully and quickly

because it's squeezed through a narrower gap.

It's exactly the same here.

Lose this.

It's a precaution.

The wind is forced through the gap between the top of the mountain

and the top of the troposphere.

That's a narrower gap so it speeds up

and that's why

it always tends to be windy at the top of a hill.

So, wind is just air rushing from one place to another.

Speeding up as it goes through narrow gaps,

slowing down as it hits obstacles.

There are winds near the ground that blow locally

and ones high in the air that can blow long distances.

And that is information you can use to your advantage.

Right.

Here's how to amaze your friends.

First, stand with the wind at your back.

Then you're looking for clouds.

If those clouds are moving overhead directly away from you,

or directly towards you,

or they're stationary,

then the weather is going to stay broadly the same.

If they're moving from left to right, it's going to get worse.

If they're moving from right to left, it's going to improve.

So, right to left, better, left to right, worse.

Straight down the middle stays the same.

As long as you have your back to the wind.

Unless you're in the southern hemisphere,

in which case you reverse that bit.

It's brilliant, isn't it? Really clever.

I mean, it's not 100% foolproof

because weather is really complicated

but it works more often than not

and that's about as much as you can say

of any form of weather forecasting, isn't it?

And the clouds must have been travelling right to left

up on Mount Washington...

..because the next morning is truly spectacular.

Unusually for this time of year, the cloud lifts

and the wind subsides...

slightly.

And I venture back outside into a suddenly magical landscape.

Folks around here quite proudly proclaim

that it has the worst weather in the world.

And, well, I don't know.

I mean, severe, yes, but looking at it like this,

worst, I'm not so sure.

But there's no doubt that this is a place shaped by wind.

It's so windy here that the buildings have to be chained down.

Even the ice appears to fly off in frozen streamers.

These streamers don't point away from the wind.

They grow towards it.

And here's how.

Ice crystals are carried through the air by the wind.

But the moment they touch an object, they freeze tight.

The next ice crystal to be blown in freezes to the first...

..gradually building outwards in the direction they blew in from.

And that gives me an idea.

I've thought of another way you can see wind.

I looked around and a lot of the snow that I can see in the air

isn't falling, it's being blown by the wind,

sticking to any available surface.

So, I've got a pocket full of this biodegradable confetti.

Let's wait for a good gust.

Watch how the confetti blows in swirling patterns.

You'd think that at these wind speeds everything would just get

whisked away in a perfectly straight line, but it doesn't.

It rolls and curls like waves crashing onto a beach.

And occasionally, those rolling eddies

turn into tightly knit spirals...

..in a shape scientists call a vortex.

It's a shape that's crucial to our story.

Because almost all the weather we think of as extreme

is based around them.

This isn't just about strong winds,

it's about the other types of weather that wind can produce.

Dust devils...

waterspouts...

tornadoes.

All are spinning winds based on this vortex pattern.

Even hurricanes and cyclones have the same spiral shape.

But to see how those spirals come about, I'm going to examine

perhaps the most unusual vortex of them all.

It's called a fire whirl.

And because they're made entirely of flames,

it's easier to see the twisting structure.

Right here is where I'm most likely to find one.

The tinder-dry forests of Western Australia.

The vegetation here is so flammable

that any stray match or lightning strike

can have it ablaze in seconds.

There are 50,000 bush fires a year in Australia

and almost any one of them is capable of creating a fire whirl.

But because the fires are so impenetrable

and because fire whirls tend to be so short-lived,

it's very rare to actually see one.

Which is why the best way to examine a fire whirl

is to build one.

But I'm not going to set about building a fire whirl on my own,

which is why I have brought two of the world's leading authorities

on fire whirls over from Japan to help.

Dr Kazunori Kuwana and engineer Kozo Sekimoto

have spent many years looking at how, and why, fire whirls spin.

And they've agreed to lend us a hand

to try and start our very own fire whirl.

But I've just discovered

this is the first time they've built a full scale one.

Which is a worry.

Especially when I see them messing about with baking tins.

Of course, we have the fire authorities on hand.

But at the moment they look like they are just there to help

with the washing-up.

Time to find out what's going on.

Chaps.

Baking tins.

I'm intrigued. How does this work?

We are trying to create a fire whirl on top of the baking pans.

We put heptane, a combustible liquid, in the pans.

Heptane. Is that what that is?

This is water.

You know that doesn't burn, don't you, at all?

Right. We put heptane on top of the water layer.

I knew that. OK. Why are they arranged in this L configuration?

If the fire, the shape of fire is entirely symmetric,

swirling motion wouldn't occur.

So, we need some kind of trigger to create a swirling motion.

This shape, this asymmetry somehow triggers something

that we're going to see?

Exactly.

Good. Will it ultimately get rid of these flies?

Because... Aargh! I see why you are wearing these nets.

I thought you were beekeepers when I arrived.

It is unimaginably unpleasant.

But this isn't merely an extreme type of pest control.

We are going to see if these 30 baking tins

can help us create a spinning vortex.

And we are not just looking for this vortex effect here,

we're also going to be looking from up there.

We need a bird's-eye view

if we are going to reveal what makes a wind spin.

And this remote controlled copter is the perfect way to get it.

That is why I've brought that guy.

That guy is the drone's pilot, Hai Tran,

a man with 25 years' experience of flying remote cameras.

I pop over to brief him on what we're after.

Right, so if we get a fire whirl going out there,

this spinning vortex, I need a shot directly over the top of it,

as it forms, you there looking down, we'll get the circle.

Just there like that.

Right, so you want me to fly over a tornado that is breathing fire?

You have used very emotive language there.

I mean, essentially, yes. Yes.

-OK.

-I mean, yes.

I think we are going to have problems there with all the wind

and the heat that is coming off the fire.

I think carbon fibre is pretty durable

but the propellers are plastic, so they'll probably melt off

at some stage.

So, how will you know if that starts happening. It'll warn you?

Because, presumably, if you get close and you hit the wind,

you'll see it go all jiggly and you can go higher?

Er, no, these things are stabilised

so the first thing we will see is the copter heading towards the fire.

So, the stabiliser will cancel out any effect of the heat

-until it melts?

-Yes.

Turn the stabiliser off.

Well... Go in raw!

Yeah, OK, erm...

You can tell your friends,

"No stabiliser and I flew it into the fiery tornado thing."

-We are talking about what, 160km winds?

-Yeah.

Yeah, no. No.

'I try to explain to Hai why fire is important to this whole story.'

Because heat can create winds.

Let me demonstrate

with this cooker.

Now, imagine the hobs represent the Earth being heated up by the sun.

Hot air rises off the hob just as it does from the hot ground,

making the air above the flames less dense,

and therefore, lower pressure.

But the cold air around the oven is still at normal pressure

so it rushes in to fill the gap, turning these children's windmills.

And we can prove that the air is rushing towards the flames

with the smoke from this match.

Higher pressure air rushing towards lower pressure air.

That is the basis of wind.

Using flames only accentuates the effect,

which is why a massive fire is the best way

to create our own extreme wind.

But it still doesn't tell us

how that extreme wind can start spinning.

That is why we need the drone.

So, here's the plan.

First, we get a flammable liquid called heptane

and fill the pans with it.

Once they're all full, we'll set light to them.

If Kazu and Kozo are right, their L-shape arrangement

will spontaneously trigger a fire whirl.

Next, we'll introduce some coloured smoke to see if our eye-in-the-sky

can capture the wind patterns at work.

Right, let's give it a go.

Time to stand well back.

At first, it all seems a bit underwhelming.

It looks, well,

it looks like 30 baking tins on fire.

But as cold air rushes in, it feeds the flames.

And then, quite suddenly, they begin to spin.

There it is.

The spin seems to intensify the fire even more.

The flames grow higher.

And higher, until they tower above us.

It's massive!

A real-life fire whirlwind.

And it seems that Hai is prepared to give it a go after all.

Climbing 20. Roger that.

If he can get close enough then we've a chance of seeing

how a fire whirl actually works.

There's a bit of turbulence up there.

Yeah, roger that.

Remember, they have no way of seeing that turbulence.

I think we are getting a bit close to the fire, Sam.

He won't know he is in trouble until the controls stop responding

and the copter literally melts out of the air.

That's looking great, mate.

OK, so now for the tricky bit.

Trying to see how our fire whirlwind was formed.

Just like we did with the cooker, we're going to introduce some smoke.

The crosswind is so strong that the smoke stays close to the ground

and, on the far side, it blows in a pretty straight line.

But on this side, parts of it bend round the L-shape

and get sucked in towards it.

Let me try and explain what's happening here.

Here's our L.

And when the wind comes from this direction,

it rolls around the end of it here,

and it's drawn towards this fire,

but it's also drawn towards this one here

and that sets it spinning, that starts our vortex.

The vortex rolls along the long arm of the L

and when it gets to the fire here, it intensifies.

And that is where our fire whirl is formed.

The cold air carrying the smoke on the inside of the L

is being pulled in two directions at once.

And it's that that creates those little spinning

swirls of green smoke.

And, ultimately,

the fire whirl our team managed to successfully capture on camera.

Now, obviously you don't generally find baking pans in the wild.

But natural Ls occur when two separate fire-fronts meet.

Each creating their own opposing winds.

And that's also pretty much how

other types of spinning weather start.

Two or more winds meeting at different angles and speeds,

some rising warm air and cold air rushing in to fill the gap.

Just those simple ingredients

can produce some of the most extreme forms of weather we have.

Including the most powerful and deadly wind of them all -

the tornado.

Because a tornado is spinning,

it can move far faster than a normal wind.

Not in a straight line,

but in the speed that they can spin.

And it's that spin that does the damage.

Look at it this way.

If I'm spinning this bucket around my head,

it's not how fast I'm walking towards you

that dictates how hard it will hit you when I get there.

Even if I walk really quickly, that speed's irrelevant.

It's how fast I am spinning the bucket that matters,

and what's in it to add to the weight,

and that's how it is with a tornado.

Debris does most of the damage. That's the weight in the bucket.

The most destructive force of the tornado itself

is its spin, its rotational speed.

Which is why it is remarkable that's the part of the tornado

we know the least about.

I'd like to find out why.

And who better to ask than the Center for Severe Weather Research

in Boulder, Colorado?

I make an appointment with its president, Josh Wurman,

to ask him why that spin speed is still such a mystery.

Scientists have gotten very good at measuring the winds above the ground

in the tornado, maybe from 50 metres above the ground

up to a couple of kilometres.

But the strongest winds in the tornado are below that.

We think the strongest winds in the tornado

might even be below ten metres.

Using remote sensing with radars, we can get up close,

we can scan back and forth, but unfortunately, objects block us.

There's debris, pieces of houses, cows, whatever, flying around

in the tornado, and that is the one place where we are the most blind.

Why isn't there just a machine that you can point at a tornado

and measure it? I mean, it is moving past, why can't you just measure it?

There are two main challenges with in situ measurements.

The first is how to get something inside a tornado.

The tornado is moving down the fields

and we don't know exactly how it's going, it is an unpredictable path.

So, getting something in front is very, very hard.

Challenge number two is what happens when we succeed,

and that is the tornado runs over the object and destroys it,

so, unfortunately, the place that we most need to know about

is the place that it is hardest for us to see.

If we can understand that better then engineers will be able

to build better buildings, we'll be able to have better shelters,

and fewer people will get injured and die in tornadoes.

But how would you begin to measure the speed of a tornado

right next to the ground?

To try and find that out, we must travel another 1,300 miles,

to the distinctly un-tornado-like landscape of London, Ontario.

And one remarkable building.

I'm going to do something a person wouldn't normally do.

I'm going in.

This is the heart!

I'm in!

This is it. I'm in the eye of it.

All I can say is, yes, this feels as amazing as I suspect it looks.

I am in a tornado, it is the most astonishing feeling, it is dizzying.

The world is roaring past and spinning round me, but I am still.

This is massively scaled down, of course.

A real one would be maybe 100 times bigger

and the wind moving maybe four or five times faster

but, nevertheless, you get a sense of the relentless, terrifying

power of one of these things in the wild.

That is the most daunting sight.

I've got goose bumps and not just because it is cold in here.

I can feel the edges of it, I can feel it moving.

It is like I am touching its flanks. It is a living, breathing thing.

It's a living, breathing, furious thing.

This is the Wind Engineering, Energy and Environment Research Institute

or WindEEE for short.

And it's the only place on the planet capable of duplicating

the real-life dynamics of a tornado.

It does it by using 106 giant fans hidden

behind the walls and ceiling of the world's first hexagonal wind tunnel.

The whole structure cost 23 million.

And it isn't even officially open yet.

We're pretty much the first visitors to set foot inside.

Which makes it all the more delicate asking its boss,

Professor Horia Hangan, for a little favour.

Just while we're here in this facility,

I'd really like to just have a little look at velocities

sort of that way in tornadoes.

Can we have a...?

Let's experiment a bit with it.

Do you mind if we make a bit of a mess?

Not a massive mess. There might be...

We'll sweep up.

You won't know we've been here, everything will be gone.

That's fine. We can do a little bit of a mess here.

So, we are prepared to catch some stuff that you throw into it, so...

-It might happen. Thank you.

-You're welcome.

Good for him. He's trusting us with his 23 million baby.

Right. Plan.

They really have let me play, sorry, experiment with this

incredible installation and I want to look more into velocity,

see how fast the wind is moving.

If I introduce these ping pong balls into our tornado,

I can measure the speed.

I'm going to feed them to it.

Go! Rise!

We think of tornadoes as sucking up everything in their path.

Turns out, it's not that easy.

I retreat to the control room

where the professor and I spend the next four hours

trying to get something, anything,

to actually fly inside the tornado.

With no luck.

And then I think of the confetti on Mount Washington.

What we need is something flat and light.

We find these pink foam squares.

They're similar to the confetti

but because they're substantially bigger

it should be easier to track their progress.

If we can get those foam squares trapped in the tornado

and if we can get them lifted up and spun round without being spat out

then we might be able to time how long it takes one to do a full lap.

That is a lot of ifs, I know, but fingers crossed.

We are going to start the fans.

You see?

There it is.

-Looking good.

-Yeah. Yeah!

That's fantastic.

There it is, it's exactly what we wanted. So, they're held in.

OK, now we've got the foam squares circling successfully,

it's time to turn on the tracking technology.

The computer follows individual squares, one after another.

So, it can create an average speed from the different trajectories.

And it works.

According to the computer,

it's spinning at a shade over 22mph.

The first time one has ever been measured this near the ground.

Now, obviously a real tornado is about 100 times bigger,

and much, much faster.

But now we know we can fly things in a fake tornado,

it stands to reason we can get them fly inside a real one.

The problem is, how are we going to get them in there?

I am not standing next to it with a bucket.

I have tried some things.

None of them really worked.

I need help with this.

So, I have made contact with a scientist

who says he might have a solution.

He's asked me to meet him here, in, well,

as it turns out, the middle of nowhere.

This bizarre vehicle is the Dominator 3.

A hand-built, tornado-proof armoured car.

And as meteorologist Reed Timer explains, it's one of a kind.

There's no other vehicle like this.

Just one big meteorological instrument.

It's like a mobile tornado probe.

-Has it ever been in the base of a tornado?

-This has.

This is the Dominator 3, so this is brand-new.

Last year we intercepted three or four tornadoes.

What happened to Dominators 1 and 2? Gone?

Oh, no! They're still...they're still on the ground, thankfully.

What I want to know is, what are the chances of using the Dominator

to measure the speed of a tornado near the ground?

Near the base of the tornado is one of the biggest mysteries

of tornado science and it's also the most important to understand because

it's those wind speeds that directly impact the structures and cause

the destruction that we see with tornadoes every spring and summer.

That's why we built this vehicle, it's to get up close

and inside those and unravel those mysteries.

So, if you could get this into a tornado,

you can deploy something into it

that will allow you physically to measure the rotational wind speeds?

Yes.

It is roughly what I was doing

with bits of foam in the indoor artificial tornado.

It's just with a real one.

-Yeah!

-It is, presumably, then, quite incredibly dangerous?

Yeah, there...there is a level of risk involved,

but, as a storm chaser, all I've done

since I was 18 years old is get close to tornadoes.

Which really begs just one question.

Are you a scientist, an adrenaline junkie or a lunatic?

-Probably all the above.

-OK.

Reed sounds like the perfect person for us.

Using the Dominator, he can get really close to a tornado

and he's already thought about how he could fire a data-recording probe

right into it.

So, I wanted to stop right here because just south of our position,

right down there, was a F5 tornado back in 1999

and they recorded the strongest wind speeds ever recorded on the planet.

Over 300mph, right down here just to our south.

In less than 21 hours, 74 tornadoes

touched down in the states of Oklahoma and Kansas.

The most prolific outbreak in history.

But the most destructive of them all was right here.

In the 60 minutes or so of its existence,

its phenomenal spin speed

caused more than 1 billion worth of damage.

Scientists measured the winds inside it at 300mph.

But those speeds don't tell the whole story.

Those winds were measured higher up above the ground

and who knows how strong those wind speeds were right near the surface

of the strongest tornado in history.

And that came through right where we are?

-Yeah.

-So, if this were a real situation...

What do you say? Hot? Live? Whatever.

If it were coming toward us and you're here with this.

What happens now?

Well, we'll look to the southwest.

If it's not moving side to side at all, it's likely coming right at us.

So, I'll line up that left edge and make sure we're in the path.

Then we'll drop the vehicle flush to the ground.

I'll show you here really quick, and we're inside, of course.

-Yeah, that would be a good idea. OK.

-Here it goes.

-Is that supposed to happen?

-Yeah.

And then the spikes also go into the ground.

And then there's the probe, right there,

and the parachute will pop up when it's at peak flight,

50 feet up, and it gets sucked into the tornado.

So, if everything works perfectly,

that probe will have gone out of there

and ended up in the tornado,

spinning around and getting that critical rotational speed?

Yeah, the tornado will pick it up.

There's updraughts in the funnel as well, it will pick up the parachute,

it will spiral around inside,

measuring temperature, moisture and pressure

at a rate of five times a second.

-And all of that will happen?

-It's going to one of these years.

-OK. Good luck.

-Thank you.

-You never know.

So, there we have it.

The Dominator is going to take the place of our woman with a bucket.

And its compressed air powered roof cannon

does the job my catapult and paintball gun couldn't.

Now all they need to do is find a real-life tornado

and park next to it.

Obviously that could take a very long time, so Reed and his team are

on their own from now on, no film crew with them.

Just them and the Dominator and a very ambitious mission.

It actually takes six weeks

but finally Reed and his crew

are hot on the heels of a real-life twister.

The trick now is to get as close as they dare.

Close enough to fire a probe straight into its heart.

But finding that heart turns out to be pretty tricky.

That's our GPS position, that's the tornado, two miles southeast.

We're getting real close!

It's right here.

A tornado can travel at about 70mph across the ground.

Right here, guys. Stop right here.

And change direction frequently and without warning.

Which makes getting ahead of one incredibly difficult.

Got to be up there.

Right there!

And they need to get to it quick.

Turn around. Got to get it turned around!

The life span of the average twister is just five to ten short minutes.

Let's go! Let's go!

There it is. On the right, see? Tornado on the ground, right there.

-Straight ahead, coming in, coming in, coming in.

-Straight ahead.

-Go!

Whoa, that's huge!

It is huge, about 100 metres across

and at least a kilometre tall.

Stop! Stop! Stop!

Perfect! Fix it.

Let's stop!

Oh, my God!

The tornado is coming straight for them.

Get ready to shoot!

It's perfect.

Deploy! Deploy!

Coming down!

Not the best time for the Dominator's window to fail.

Roll your window up, Reed. You have to roll your window up.

-Here it is.

-Tell me when.

We're in it! We're in it!

Shoot! Shoot the pole!

-It's in.

-It's right there, next to us!

I've seen it go all the way round. It went one full revolution.

It's in.

They got the probe inside.

I saw it make one full revolution then I lost visual on it,

so I know it at least went around one time.

But that's only half the challenge.

Now they need to retrieve it to find out what it recorded.

They wait for the storm to pass then set off,

out through the trail of devastation in search of the probe.

So how far ahead do you think it is?

Probably about three miles, I would say.

For some reason, they're not picking up its GPS signal

so they're reduced to searching on foot.

When I launched it, I saw it go out over the road that way.

It spun around like this, all the way around

and it descended either behind these trees or these trees right here.

We are within a couple of hundred feet of it right now.

OK, so it's got to be somewhere over this way, over here.

I had full visual...

Against all the odds, they spot it.

THEY CHEER

But the probe is damaged.

Its trip around the twister has torn away the housing,

leaving the electronics exposed.

So, were they successful?

The moment I get word, I'm straight on to Reed to find out.

-Hi, Reed?

-Hey, Richard!

You got the thing into a tornado?

-Yes, we did.

-Was that a special moment?

It was a very special moment, a very scary moment too, honestly,

I think I might be getting a little too old for these tornado intercepts.

But our ears were popping from the pressure fall,

it was a pretty intense tornado

and seeing the probe take off was definitely an amazing feeling.

-So, you've got it, you've got the probe.

-Yep.

The information is stored on it and what we want to know is

the speed at the base and the different heights in the tornado.

That data is possibly on the probe?

I'm betting it's on the probe, but we'll be able to get it off here.

It should be any week, any day now.

We've got so close!

I mean, yeah, there it is. A lot of that. OK.

Reed and his team have accomplished something

that no-one has ever done before.

They've managed to get a flying probe into the base of a tornado.

CHEERING AND LAUGHING

Today is the first time we've recovered one that we know

was inside a tornado.

This is a huge success for our science mission.

I'd say this is definitely a stepping stone

for things to come in the future.

It's a proud moment.

Unfortunately, the probe turned out to be too badly damaged,

so they're planning on doing it all over again.

We've discovered what winds are and how they begin.

How their paths can be used to predict the weather.

We've seen the way a wind can start to spin.

And how spinning winds are the basis for much of our extreme weather.

More than anything, we are one step closer to revealing

one of weather's greatest mysteries.

How fast a tornado can spin.

But, for the moment, the actual answer is still a weather secret.

Next time,

I try and capture a cloud, to see just how much one really weighs.

This is a fairly unusual exercise, cloud collecting.

I discover what would happen if rain fell in one big lump.

I test the astounding hardness of hail.

Oh!

And the unbelievable speed of an avalanche.

I'm speechless, genuinely speechless.

You can find out more about Wild Weather

with The Open University's free wall poster.

Call 0845 030 3045 or go to...

..and follow the links to The Open University.