Tornados are just wind at close range.

I find tornados really interesting: dark funnels of power and destruction. From far away they look like a "wall of cloud", and over the last 6 months I spent a bunch of time on YouTube trying to understand what a "wall of cloud" looks like up close. The answer was a bit underwhelming:

1. Viewed from close range, tornados just look like strong winds.
2. Tornados do not usually have a well-defined boundary. There is no "wall" per se.
3. Not all tornados have a visible condensation funnel, and there can be large mismatches between the "visible" tornado and the region of damaging winds.

So, in a sense my time was wasted chasing something that doesn't exist. In the rest of the post, I will link to some of the best videos I watched and give my comments.¹

El Reno 2013

The El Reno 2013 Tornado is commonly referred to as the "widest tornado ever" at 4.2km wide and had lots of videos filmed at all ranges. I liked this video as a general overview of the tornado:

However, up close it seemed... less impressive. This video from Dan Robinson shows him driving through the edge of the tornado (I've clipped the video to start roughly where he enters the tornado).

This video basically looks like driving through a thunderstorm. You can see low-hanging clouds around and the wind is clearly strong, but it doesn't exactly scream "tornado" to me.

Apparently this tornado actually taught scientists a lot about the structure of violent tornados. The 2013 El Reno tornado essentially contained a bunch of smaller tornados within a larger "circulation" which itself had tornado-strength winds. Because in the USA records of tornado width are determined by ground damage and not from video or radar, the record-breaking width was essentially due to this "outer circulation" which Dan Robinson drove through. So, this "counted" as the tornado, despite not being the strongest part of the tornado.

Another view of inside the tornado is here:

Here, the powerful sub-vortices are visible before the camera stops filming the outside (and then the car is flipped by the winds). As far as I can tell the car is within the outer wind field while shooting this though.

My conclusions from El Reno are:

1. You can technically be "inside" a powerful tornado without it seeming super visually impressive
2. There is more structure within an interesting tornado besides a "wall of wind" (eg regions of lower and higher wind speed, different separate vortices).

Storm chasers directly being hit by the "core" of a tornado

This is somebody named "HIGH RISK Chris" being hit by a tornado in his car:

In the initial moments you see strong winds and some wisps of clouds, but no "wall". It looks a bit like clouds when viewed through an airplane window.

This is a team of scientists in a special armored car which should be able to survive tornadic winds. Here is a video from just a few days ago:

The tornado itself basically looks like strong wind.

This is the best video I found in my YouTube journey, by the same team as above. Their car gets directly hit by the tornado and they get pretty good footage from within the tornado (plus drone footage of what the tornado looks like from a distance). You also get to see the wind change direction as the tornado passes over them.

However, in the tornado itself, all you see is wind and debris. There is not a great shot of them entering the tornado, but you do see them exit and all that seems to happen is that the wind intensity dies down. No "sudden exit".

Other good close-up footage

This tornado was filmed with a good zoom lens. It has damaging winds but not a clearly visible funnel, and basically looks like wind.