Word: tornado
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...somewhere between comedy and a call to arms. Bad news, he insists, is what he most likes to watch on TV; it means the system is breaking down. "I want to see a paint factory blowing up.I want to see an oil refinery explode. I want to see a tornado hit a church on Sunday. I want to know there's some guy running through the K Mart with an automatic weapon firing at the clerks. I want to see thousands of people in the street killing policemen...
...Aircraft. The contractors' argument is that if the U.S. turns down the deal, the Saudis will go to a European manufacturer. The Saudis have 96 F-15s, which they began acquiring in the early 1980s, but when the U.S. refused sales in mid-decade, the Saudis acquired British-made Tornado jets in a deal ultimately valued at $30 billion. "The question," says Vince O'Reilly, spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, "is whether the Saudis buy aircraft made in St. Louis or from British Aerospace...
...plane with a large red dot on the fuselage fly past, and a corpsman shouted, "The Japs are bombing us!" A bomb hit the destroyer Shaw in dry dock, and the concussion broke windowpanes in the hospital and blew our clothes and hair as if we were in a tornado...
Even when the aged system is working, it has a blind spot for what meteorologists call "mesoscale" events, measured in minutes and tens of miles: tornadoes, flash floods, squall lines and thunderstorms. Some Weather Service offices do not issue a tornado warning until a human actually sights a twister -- by which time it is often too late to get out of harm's way. False alarms of flash floods have become so common that they are usually ignored...
...tiny droplets in the center of a cloud and picking up the echoes, Doppler systems can map the relative velocity of wind currents within the cloud. High-velocity winds and a high level of organization can signal the formation of a mesocyclone -- a precursor to a full-fledged tornado...