Word: meteorologists
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...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 in mud and cow manure...
Storm-chasing scientists do have a genius for coming up with some pretty wild ideas, however. The University of Oklahoma's Howard Bluestein really did develop an instrument akin to the device called Dorothy in Twister. Bluestein, who was one of the models for meteorologist Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) in the movie, named his device the Totable Tornado Observatory, TOTO for short, and tried to intercept an oncoming funnel. TOTO was a bit unwieldy (it tipped the scales at 400 lbs.), so researchers switched to the more sprightly Turtles, which are cheaper to build and more easily deployed...
...another possibility, says UCLA meteorologist Roger Wakimoto, is that the tornadoes typical of supercell storms are formed by the same mechanism that creates the smaller, less destructive funnel clouds known as waterspouts, landspouts and dust devils. These twisters all build their vortexes not from the clouds down but from the ground up. They are triggered, Wakimoto says, by low-lying eddies of air that are perturbed by a fast-moving front or some other local disturbance. When a supercell storm passes over such an area, swirling air near the ground could easily be sucked into the updraft and spun...
...question [for snow storms] to happen in April," said Chuck S. Maxwell, a meteorologist...
...another large storm will form along the southern coast that is expected to provide a memorable echo of Sunday's deluge. "One computer model, the one that predicted the last storm, says that it will track up the coast and produce heavy snow, especially in the New England area," meteorologist Tom Moore of the National Weather Service tells TIME Daily. "Another model says that the storm might turn around the Carolinas and head out to sea. It's still a bit up in the air right now." Moore says two "Storms of the Century" are unlikely to occur...