“I realised it was very likely the tornado was killing people while I was collecting data,” Robin Tanamachi explains. “It gave a lot of gravity to the situation, and really drove home just how serious the work was that I was doing.”
Tanamachi, an associate professor and research meteorologist at Purdue University in Indiana, can clearly remember the tornado that stands out in her memory. On May 31, 2013, she was observing an EF-3 tornado in central Oklahoma, close to El Reno, with winds reaching 295 mph (475 km/h). The tornado was enormous and highly violent.
Eight people were killed in the El Reno tornado, which was the largest tornado ever recorded.
I was seven months pregnant at the time, and the pressure change was giving me contractions, so I just remember being so emotionally heavy at that moment,” Tanamachi recalls.
