The Smell of Tornadoes

“The Smell of Tornadoes,” Howard G. Altschule and Bernard Vonnegut, Weatherwise, vol. 50, no. 2, 1997, pp. 24–5. Vonnegut, older brother of and inspiration to the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, was awarded the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize in meteorology for his 1975 report, “Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed.” This 1997 paper says [AIR 16:1]:

“The accounts we have found identify a smell of sulfur, similar to that of a newly lit match, as a feature of some tornadoes. We present some of them… in the hope they will stimulate new interest in this puzzling phenomenon.”