Word: tornadoes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...story: Stormy Tornado (Betty Grable) and Curly Flagg (Sheree North) are a couple of down-at-the-G-string chorines. The star of their show. Stripper Cherry Blossom Wang, surprises every body by getting herself bumped off. and Stormy and Curly, having seen the murderer, take off to hide. They pick the men's dormitory of a small college. The academic atmosphere is charged with excitement. Sheree is accidentally hypnotized by a student-and remains in that state for most of the picture. Betty cuddles up with an overage student (Robert Cummings) who stays on in school because...
Peculiar Pattern. Tornado clouds are unpleasant subjects to study at close range, and so they are not completely understood. But practical information about them has accumulated. In 1948. Meteorologists Ernest J. Fawbush and Robert C. Miller were on duty at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, when a tornado swept across it. After the disaster they went over their data on conditions before the storm and found a "peculiar pattern." Five days later they came to their office, took a look at the day's charts and saw the same weather pattern. They did not dare use the dread...
...general, they smelled a tornado when a layer of warm, moist air was covered by a layer of cool, dry air. The wind had to be strong and in the right direction, and the warm air at the surface had to be subject to a strong lifting action. When these conditions (and more subtle ones) coincided, a tornado was likely to lick out from the black center of a cloud...
This sort of warning, though useful, is still pretty general, affecting a large area that may be struck by only a single tornado. It cannot tell which thundercloud is a potential bad actor. Radar does not help much. It shows a squall line advancing, but tornado storms in the line look like ordinary thunderheads...
...Waves Know. A new electronic tool is much more promising than radar. As far back as 1947, Dr. Herbert L. Jones of Oklahoma Agricultural and Mining College discovered that lightning flashes from tornado clouds send out "sferics" (atmospheric radio waves) of unusually high frequency. Such waves can be detected a long way off, and distinguished from ordinary thunderstorm sferics...