In a small Texas town during the holiday season, Ethan Walker, a meteorologist and part-time professor working at the local university studying tornadoes, is woken in the middle of the night for a call about a tornado that has just hit. His team is assembling at the lab and he needs to report. His wife Addison, a TV news reporter, is also summoned to work to do a piece on the tornado for the morning news. Ethan realizes the conditions are ripe for more tornadoes. Although he and his wife have been having marriage problems, he calls her and begs her to put the warning out, but the station's slick meteorologist thinks it was an isolated incident. Addison tries to get him to change his mind, but he won't -- because it's Christmas time and he does not want to be a Scrooge with some hypothetical news. When a tornado levels the Walker's house on Christmas Eve, Ethan and his wife must come together to help save others and rescue their missing children.