Word: chases
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...Computer and explosive technology to die for (many will). An imperturbably resourceful undercover agent (in this case Tom Cruise) who must, among other strenuous chores, penetrate a supposedly impregnable vault wherein reposes a secret, sacred document that everybody else is pursuing too. And last but not least: a helicopter/train chase ending in the predictable fireball that equally predictably fails even to singe Cruise's beetle brows...
...truth, storm chasing is arduous work that generally entails more common sense than courage and more physical discomfort than danger. Professional chasers often drive 15 hours a day for days at a time, subsisting on junk food and virtually no sleep. "We eat whatever Texaco, Conoco and Citgo are willing to serve up," laughs University of Oklahoma meteorologist Joshua Wurman. Nor do the hazards of the job always come from nature. Last year Wurman stopped during a chase to help extract a car from a ditch. "While I was pushing, the driver gunned his engine and I was covered...
...experts for years, and the VORTEX project was launched to answer it. First in 1994 and again in 1995, VORTEX brought dozens of meteorologists to Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas during May and June--peak tornado season in that part of the country. Every few days for nearly 10 weeks, chase teams piled into planes, vans and cars equipped with every measuring device imaginable--satellite positioning systems, state-of-the-art radar, rooftop weather stations--and raced hundreds of miles to catch up with the storms deemed likely to generate twisters...
...data they recorded--wind speed, temperature, pressure, humidity--have turned out to be extraordinarily rich. "We got more good data out of VORTEX," exclaims Peter Hildebrand of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, "than we had collected in the past 30 years." Among other things, the chase teams managed to position a Turtle so it actually caught the sharp pressure drop as a VORTEX passed overhead; tucked into the center of the tornado's swirling interior, a cylinder of down-flowing air that may be the equivalent of a hurricane's eye was spotted by researchers...
Rasmussen and his colleagues are just beginning to work their way through the VORTEX data, and they cannot yet say how well the different models are faring. Like all successful experiments, VORTEX has produced more questions than answers, and later this month chase teams will take to the road to try to answer some of them. For instance, how important is it that the tornadoes observed by VORTEX all hit areas that had been visited by storms earlier the same day? No one knows. "Right now," says University of Oklahoma researcher Jerry Straka, "VORTEX has confused the hell...