OTUS Project Collects Critical Surface Wind Data Inside Of Tornadoes

Forbes

16 hours ago

Footage filmed by an OTUS drone as it nears the cone of a tornado near Arnett, Oklahoma, May 18, 2025. Photo courtesy of OTUS
As any seasoned storm chaser or meteorologist will tell you, the business of predicting tornadoes, while better than in the past, is still largely hit or miss.
Supercells, the massive cloud structures that produce twisters, can have all of the traditional weather ingredients required to drop a tornado, but it doesn't happen. At other times, conditions may be less than perfect, and a tornado will suddenly appear. This anomaly, of course, makes it difficult to, in a timely manner, send tornado warnings out to alert the public as to when to shelter.
Part of the problem, says Louis Tucker, a recent business/engineering graduate of Virginia Tech, is that tornadic winds close to the ground are difficult to measure, and therefore aren't fully understood. Radar can measure fairly accurately wind speed and direction higher up, say, above 200 hundred feet. But that doesn't tell the story of what's going on at the surface, the area of a tornado that's most damaging to humans and their dwellings.
What to do? With brother Nelson, Louis devised a system whereby special drones with three-dimensional wind sensors can be flown near, or even into, the cones of tornadoes to take such critical measurements close to the ground.
Louis Tucker piloting his OTUS drone near Higgins, Oklahoma, May 18, 2025. Courtesy of OTUS
Louis is a crack drone racer. He won the National Collegiate Drone Racing Championship in 2023. Brother Nelson is a tornado fanatic studying meteorology at Millersville University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who can recite the history of epic twisters going all the way back to the early 1900s - the locations of, and the damage they've done. Put the two siblings together and voila, you have OTUS, Observation Of Tornadoes By UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) Systems.
With the help of veteran storm chaser Erik Fox, and aerospace engineer Tanner Beard, OTUS was born in 2024. The group chased with their special drones for two weeks last May with the goal of intercepting a twister or two to prove their concept, and to secure funding. They did penetrate a twister in Duke, Oklahoma, gathering valuable data, and, as a result score some initial public funding. But recent budget cuts to NOAA and government weather services took away most of that.
Undaunted, this past spring the group found and penetrated a half-dozen tornadoes. One, the Spiritwood, North Dakota, wedge earlier this month, was rated at least EF-3 (ratings go from EF-o to EF-5), quite a monster.
Speaking of ratings, another benefit to Tucker's research is to help revamp the controversial EF system. Today, a rating is based on damage a tornado does versus its actual wind speeds. So you can have a violent tornado rated less than it should be just because it travels through a non-populated area - and vice versa. The ability to measure surface wind speeds will help with that.
The OTUS team (L-R): Erik Fox, Louis Tucker, Tanner Beard, Nelson Tucker. Courtesy of OTUS
Tucker estimates that his group has put more than $25,000 of their own money into OTUS. A documentary filmed this past spring, produced by Paradigm Films, is in the works and due out next year. And a detailed report on OTUS surface wind data gathered this year, now being calculated and reviewed, will be out this summer. Hopefully, the report and documentary will help attract more private and public funding, Tucker says.
By the way, the video footage OTUS has amassed from near and inside of funnels is stunning (links below), something never seen before. As such, we're going to keep an eye on Tucker and his crew, perhaps even chase with them for an immersive experience. So stay tuned. This is Part 1 of a multi-part series.