The sight and sound of a three-kilometre wide tornado bearing down on him is something James Grimsley will never forget.

"It is almost mesmerising ... the amount of energy that it possesses is incredible," he said.

"It is an evil sound ... just an evil sound like a shriek."

He survived the tornado, but his ute ended up mangled in a tree.

Residents of Oklahoma and other states in America's tornado alley currently have warning times of about 10 minutes to prepare their escape or to take shelter.

Dr Grimsley, from the University of Oklahoma, hopes drones can increase that warning time substantially.

James Grimsley's mangled truck, pictured after a tornado in Oklahoma.

"There are still things we do not fully understand but we are getting better in our ability to track where [tornadoes] go," he said.

"The biggest problem we have now is there are lots of parts of the atmosphere we do not understand, atmospheric phenomena that we are unable to measure.

"A lot of times it is dangerous to use manned aircraft. We do not want to put a helicopter in a certain situation ... we do not want them too close to the tornado because it is too dangerous or not practical.

"At some point we want to use small unmanned aerial vehicles that are expendable, to get into regions of the atmosphere to look at these phenomena."

Dr Grimsley, along with colleagues from Oklahoma State University as well as the US National Weather Centre, is working with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at a dedicated drone field near Stillwater, Oklahoma.

The "off the shelf" drones are inexpensive, foam, radio-controlled airplanes that are flown using laptop operated autopilots.

From the air, the drones can send back images from front and wingtip mounted cameras as well as infrared vision and other monitoring.

A researcher from Oklahoma State University at a dedicated drone field in Stillwater.

When the ABC visited, the airfield was fogged in and the temperature was around freezing.

The wings of the drone were icing over and the front camera was getting too wet to provide clear vision.

It was "perfect weather" for experimenting with their equipment.

"We have not got this data point yet," said a grinning Professor Jamey Jacobs from the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Oklahoma State University.

In this part of the world they call bushfires wildfires and these scientists want to make a drone that a volunteer fire fighter in rural Oklahoma can put in the sky and monitor with a mobile phone or tablet.

"We do not know how these vehicles will operate, how well they communicate with the ground control station, how well the pilot in command will be able to control it under all these different scenarios," Professor Jacobs said.

"So one of the things we are studying is how the vehicles and the crew react under different conditions."

And the drones have to be cheap to build and operate.

"The idea is to try to find something that is relatively inexpensive. Most of our fire departments are volunteer," Professor Jacobs said.

"They do not have the money to spend on $100,000 worth of equipment, so they need something relatively inexpensive that is still going to be very robust."

While the bushfire season is some time away, Oklahoma's tornado season begins in a few weeks and this team of scientists hope to have as many of their drones in the skies as they can.

ABC News Online international correspondent Mark Corcoran leads an ABC research project on news-gathering applications of drone technology. In this introductory report, he examined the concept of media deploying drones to cover conflict, civil unrest and disasters:

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