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themselves. Teaching the public to be weather-wise is just as importantas devising and broadcasting accurate forecasts. An old friend and colleague, the tornado researcher Chuck Doswell, summed it up:
    If our forecasts are perfect but the users don’t receive the message, don’t understand the message, don’t know what to do with the message, and don’t act upon the contents of the message, then our time and effort have been wasted.
    Spann spends hundreds of unpaid hours every year teaching storm-spotter classes, giving presentations at public libraries, and preaching the gospel of weather safety to just about anyone who will listen. His favorite audience, without question, is children.
    Every morning during the school year, Spann drives to an elementary school somewhere in Alabama. For more than two decades, he has been giving this weather talk—the same one he gave the day he met Jason Simpson in the high school parking lot—and it has evolved into a presentation with stunning photographs and cool videos that make students gasp and laugh and wonder. Teachers book him a year in advance.
    The students are anywhere from first to sixth graders, and they cannot wait to meet a celebrity they watch every night on TV. To welcome him, they color posters of tornadoes and sleet and hurricanes and hang them all over the halls, or the school library, or the auditorium where they gather for a celebrity assembly.
    â€œHe’s a superstar!” teachers say. “When he comes here we get as excited as the students, ’cause we always learn something, too.”
    Spann’s talk lays an approachable foundation for understanding the atmosphere and, ultimately, tornadoes. He does this to get kids excited about science, because whatever the kids learn, they go home and teach their parents. And when the weather turns, they will herd their parents into the hall closet and shame them into wearing a football or bike helmet.
    On a recent talk, James addressed several fifth-grade classes gathered in an elementary school library.
    â€œEverybody breathe in!” James said to the assembly. “Breathe out!”
    The library audibly exhaled.
    â€œThat was a science experiment!” James said. “You proved that there’s air in here!”
    The fifth graders giggled. Air has weight, he explained—not enough to feel—but a little weight that can be measured by a . . .
    Barometer! the fifth graders yelled in unison. They always knew more than the first graders, and he could count on their participation. He was most comfortable around people this age, more so than around adults, and certainly more so than around the seventh graders, who were approaching the evil age of thirteen, when it is no longer cool to yell out in an assembly.
    â€œYes! That’s where these numbers come from,” James said, the screen behind him flashing to a picture of today’s weather map. “These are units of pressure called millibars, and when the barometer’s like, really really high, what letter shows up?”
    H!
    â€œWhen you see an H on a weather map, that means the air there is kinda heavier than the surrounding air. And when something’s heavy, it doesn’t go up. It goes where?”
    Down!
    â€œWhen air sinks, it crushes the clouds away. It’s like, sunny. So typically, when you see an H it’s kinda sunny. And in the winter it’s also kinda what?”
    Cold!
    â€œCold air is heavy. But around these lows, air tends to be light. The winds converge. Air goes where?”
    Up!
    â€œWhen air goes up, you get clouds and rain. So half my job is figuring out if air is going up or if air is going . . .”
    Down!
    â€œWait a minute. If air is going up, and air is going down, that means air has what?”
    Silence.
    â€œWaves—like the ocean. You just can’t see them,” James said, showing them a pressure map that looked like a