At least six people died and 23 were injured by multiple devastating tornadoes that rolled through the Tennessee Valley on Saturday. One of them, an EF2 twister (on the 0-to-5 scale for intensity) with 130 mph winds, carved a nearly 30-mile path through the heart of Hendersonville, just north of downtown Nashville.

Remarkable video populated social media quickly after the tornadoes lifted, including one of a driver who unwittingly found himself inside an EF3 tornado in Clarksville, Tenn., about 45 miles to the northwest. But perhaps the most staggering videos were those of an explosion at the Nashville Electric Service power station, which accompanied the Hendersonville tornado’s passage directly overhead.

As the tornado’s roiling funnel chews through neighborhoods, a brilliant orange fireball appears. Flames leap into the air, disappearing from bottom to top a moment later and being replaced by dense black smoke.

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“We can confirm that the now viral video showing a fireball in the sky during Middle Tennessee’s violent and catastrophic tornadoes last weekend was indeed NES power equipment at our North Substation,” wrote Nashville Electric Service in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

And for a moment, viral video captures footage of the tornado’s vortex appearing to … disappear as the fireball explodes. But it doesn’t, in reality.

Tornadoes themselves are, technically, invisible. The definition of a tornado is just a “rapidly rotating column of air extending vertically from the surface to the base of a cumuliform cloud,” according to the American Meteorological Society. And you can’t see air.

The reason we can see a tornado is due to moisture, which produces a “condensation funnel.” Water vapor, the gas form of water, is invisible — until it condenses and forms a cloud droplet. That happens when the tornado’s low pressure expands and cools the air (and the water in it) to the point of condensation — described by meteorologists as the “dew point.”

But when the explosion happened, it instantaneously released an exceptional amount of heat. That warmed the air above the dew point, meaning that moisture existed as a gas rather than as droplets. And the tornado’s funnel cloud became invisible.

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The blast of heat may have very briefly disrupted the lower part of the tornado, but not holistically. For a few seconds, the base of the twister probably experienced some minor reshuffling or reorganization, but it’s important to remember that the tornado cyclone — or column of spin associated with a tornado — extends above 10,000 feet into a storm cloud.

Any hypothetical disruption to the tornado would occur in the lowest 100 to 200 feet of the atmosphere, or roughly 1 to 2 percent of the depth of the tornado cyclone. With rapidly moving air continuing to ascend just above the ground (and perhaps fueled by the buoyancy imparted by the explosion’s heat), it would be very easy for the base of the tornado to quickly get its act together once again — probably within a few seconds or less.

Can you bomb a tornado?

The apparent brief disruption of the tornado’s base raises the question of whether one could intentionally bomb a tornado to weaken it.

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As Saturday’s tornado illustrated, the power expended by a tornado in any single second dwarfs most non-military-grade explosions. That means fireworks and backyard pyrotechnics won’t do it.

Knocking just the visible funnel off-kilter isn’t enough. That’s like snipping only a few leaves off a weed and expecting it not to grow again; you need to get it by the roots.

You would need to disrupt the airflow within the parent supercell thunderstorm without energizing its updraft with the heat released by the explosion. This would require a massive bomb or explosive, perhaps equivalent to the force of the atomic bombs dropped in the 1940s.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory has weighed on in on this and concluded it’s a bad idea:

No one has tried to disrupt the tornado because the methods to do so could likely cause even more damage than the tornado. Detonating a nuclear bomb, for example, to disrupt a tornado would be even more deadly and destructive than the tornado itself. Lesser tactics (like deploying huge piles of dry ice or smaller conventional weaponry) would be too hard to get into the right place fast enough, and would likely not have enough impact to affect the tornado much anyway.

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