Flying into Tornadoes with The OTUS Project

May 2024.

I'm

inside the tornado.

A drone flies into the eye of a tornado.

It's the

first time it's ever been done.

So I kind of go through that condensation above, kind of drop down into the eye.

Do I need to come back? Should I come back? Yeah, come back, come back.

And you're seeing these, like, vortices spinning around.

It was just like, is this real? Like, this is crazy.

That's Lewis Tucker.

He and his younger brother, Nelson, didn't grow up storm chasing.

They grew up almost nothing alike.

This was not in the cards for me.

One obsessed with drones, one obsessed with weather.

But over a dinner table one night, those two different obsessions collided into something nobody thought was possible.

And I was like, oh yeah, you know, you could probably build a drone that could fly through a tornado.

And he was like, really? Like all of science disagrees with that.

Science disagreed.

They did it anyway.

It's

the first time it had ever been done in history.

Today on Atmosphere, we're flying drones into tornadoes with Lewis Tucker of the Otis Project.

I'm meteorologist Emily Gracie, and this is Atmosphere, a podcast where science becomes conversation.

Each week, I sit down with the experts behind the forecasts, the research, and the headlines to explore not just the science, but the human stories behind it.

Through natural curiosity, we're making science more understandable, more relatable, and hopefully bringing a little more comfort in how we experience the world around us.

If you're in the weather algorithm and you've spent any time on social media over the past year, there's a good chance you've seen them.

These absolutely jaw-dropping videos of drones flying inside tornadoes.

They're not CGI.

They're not simulation.

They're real footage captured by a team called the OTIS Project, which stands for Observations of Tornadoes by UAV Systems.

Otis is a self-funded nonprofit using custom-built drones and specialized sensors to get measurements from inside and around tornadoes, places where historically we've had a really hard time collecting data.

The project was started by brothers Nelson and Lewis Tucker and engineer Tanner Beard.

And in 2024, they successfully flew a drone through a tornado for the first time.

Since then, they've been continuing to push the technology, and their videos have gone viral, giving us all a pretty incredible look at the inside of these storms.

But as amazing as the footage is, the goal here isn't to make cool videos.

They're trying to answer some pretty fundamental questions about tornadoes.

What are the winds actually doing near the surface? What's happening with the temperature, pressure, and humidity inside the storm? And can that information ultimately help us build better models and better warnings? Today on Atmosphere, I'm talking with Lewis Tucker, the co-founder and CEO of the Otis Project, about what it's like to fly a drone into a tornado, what they've learned and what we still don't know, and what it feels like to watch your tiny aircraft disappear into one of nature's most powerful forces.