Word: oklahomas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...real-life science that inspired Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg, creators of the dinosaur blockbuster Jurassic Park, to make the movie in the first place. For Davies-Jones is not some casual thrill seeker but a serious scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) in Norman, Oklahoma. Over the past 2 1/2 decades, he and his colleagues have revolutionized the study of tornadoes, teaching deskbound meteorologists to pack up their instruments and take them into the field...
...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 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...
...tornadoes. Why does one threatening-looking storm produce a tornado while others seemingly just like it do not? This question has dogged tornado 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...
...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...