Joshua Wurman, director of the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colorado, has spent the past several days in pursuit of tornadoes across Oklahoma. “It’s been a very busy time,” Wurman tells National Geographic.

And yet many people’s thinking about tornadoes is shaped as much by folk wisdom passed down from their parents as it is by solid science. For example, one piece of folk wisdom has it that moving to the southwest corner of a basement or building reduces risk of injury during a tornado. There are no data to support that, Wurman says, noting that the important thing is to stay low and away from windows.

Wurman works with a team of scientists to position mobile instruments as close as possible to severe weather events. This includes Doppler on Wheels (DOW), a Doppler radar system mounted on a truck, and instruments called Tornado Pods, 3.3-feet-high (1-meter-high) towers that measure wind speed and direction.

“By having the radar up close we can get much finer resolution,” says Wurman. “It’s like painting your finger at arm’s length versus being across the parking lot. The goal is trying to understand better how tornadoes form, the 3-D structure of the winds, and how they do damage.”

His work isn’t all about the heart-pounding thrill of a storm chase: “Parts are very boring and tedious.”

“We eat bad food and stay in mediocre hotels,” he says. “We know gas stations and truck stops by heart, so that’s not so fun. But what is fun is to learn things that have never been known before.

Seeing inside a tornado with this level of detail for the first time ever is like seeing a new continent.”

Wurman says that some popular thinking about tornadoes is out of date and could even be dangerous. He helped us assemble this list of five persistent tornado myths:

Myth #1: Tornadoes target trailer parks.

Tornadoes do not “seek out” trailer parks more than any other neighborhoods. Trailer parks “do have a lower threshold for being damaged,” Wurman says, which has helped lead to more media attention on those areas.

Well-built framed houses can typically survive tornado-force winds of 120 miles per hour (193 kilometers per hour), Wurman says. But poorly built houses, and a lot of older mobile homes, can sustain significant damage at those speeds because they are weaker structures.

“I’ve seen that with hurricanes in Florida,” Wurman says. “A trailer park was just devastated, but wood-framed homes nearby were pretty much OK, with just some minor roof damage, even though they saw the same winds.”

He adds that much of the Midwest region known as Tornado Alley plays host to homes that were not built up to modern codes, largely because they are so rural that there aren’t true codes or because owners couldn’t afford to follow the rules.

Myth #2: During tornadoes, drivers should shelter under overpasses.

“That might not be such a good idea because wind could accelerate under the overpass,” Wurman says.

And climbing an overpass is a definite no-no, since being up in the air could make someone more likely to get hit by windblown debris.

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About the Eagles

The nest featured here is about five feet wide and made mostly of sticks. It sits about 80 feet up in a tree on the grounds of the Metropolitan Police Academy. Installing the webcam, provided by National Geographic, was Chief of Police Cathy L. Lanier’s idea. She has long been interested in the eagle pair that chose the academy grounds for its home. “It is fitting and exciting that our national bird has made a home on the Metropolitan Police Department’s Academy grounds,” said Lanier. “We look forward to viewing the eagles in their habitat.”

The eagles are thought to be the same pair that has nested in the area for several years, says Craig Koppie, raptor biologist at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Chesapeake Bay field office in Annapolis, Maryland. Koppie is an advisor on the Earth Conservation Corps eagle restoration project, which also oversees a second bald eagle nest in Washington.

Bald eagle nests usually contain one to three dull-white eggs, and the parents take turns incubating them. Eggs hatch in about five weeks, and hatchlings are covered with soft, fluffy, light-gray feathers. “Generally the female stays on the nest while the father’s job is to bring in the food,” Koppie says. Food for this pair of eagles is generally fish—catfish, shad, or perch—plucked from the Anacostia.

Read More & Watch the Webcam!

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