Word: stormfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...guerrillas forced small government outposts in La Trinidad and San Isidro to surrender. A major battle shaped up in León, Nicaragua's second largest city (pop. 44,000), where the Sandinistas surrounded a national guard installation, drew up a captured armored car and prepared to storm the garrison...
...farm lands of western Oklahoma. Moore and his aide, Bill Moyer, another O.U. meteorology student, keep peering at the sky, noting the cloud peaks tilting to the southeast, indicating that jet-stream winds are active. "That's good," Moore notes, "real good." Two essential ingredients for a tornadic storm seem to be present, and just as surely moving inexorably toward a showdown. If the cold, swift-moving jet-stream wind persists and clashes with the warm, moist lower air from the south, the atmosphere will be forced to readjust dramatically, creating the vortex of vertical air currents that cause...
From Erick, Okla., over near the Texas border, Moore calls Norman. The lab reports that the storm clouds are "falling apart." Moore is unconvinced. He heads west again to get a better look at a cloud bank that seems to contradict the forecast. "Look at that thing!" Moore yells. "It's going up! Hell yes, it's going up!" He throws the pickup into a fast U-turn. He turns on the AM radio just in time to hear an unmistakable crackle. "If I didn't know better," Moore shouts, "I'd say that was lightning...
...truck's roof. It is 6:16 p.m. Moore pushes east as the hailstones, some of them literally the size of golf balls, threaten to crack our windshield. After plowing through a curtain of hail and rain, the truck turns south and breaks through the devastating storm. As it rolls through tiny Covington (pop. 605), every light in town blinks off and on, twice, because of storm-blown power lines. "Look for an escape route," Moore warns Moyer...
...storm tears away to the south east, passing north of Oklahoma City. The pickup heads for Norman. It has taken 500 miles of driving and ten hours, but Moore has caught his tornado, and it didn't catch him. The 11 ft. of film on which he captured nature's awesome dervish will be scrutinized by NSSL scientists and added to the incomplete yet growing mosaic of knowledge about storms that kill an average of 250 people a year and do a billion dollars worth of damage...