But what is it exactly that meteorologists see?

Well, let's take a look.

The yellow and green colors you see here are going to be your very heavy rain in the storm.

The red color indicates your hail core, and then all the way down there, the purple circle that's where your tornado is going to be.

A meteorologist often refer to it as the hook echo because of the hook shape that it ends up taking.

But these are the Onley features we look for.

We also have to take a look at the winds inside the storm.

Imagine this flagpole was inside of our storm and the flags going all the way up to the very top of the cloud.

The thing is, the wind changes direction as you go up, so this naturally creates that rotation necessary for funnel clouds and also even tornadoes.

So now let's take a look at the base of that storm.

What you have is you have very warm inflow, warm air coming into the storm and rising because that's what warm air does.

It goes up But you also have cold air coming down from the tops of the clouds and sinking all the way down towards the bass.

Now together these help to create wind shear down near the perimeter and that is what helps create some of the more violent tornadoes.

Now, what if your tornado has been on the ground for atleast a little bit?

Then you start to get this the debris cloud, which is essentially a collection off all of the stuff that tornado has been able to pick up everything from dust to trees to even homes.