Word: twister
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course the researchers who chase intense storms never want to get that close to a tornado either, and they also try to avoid getting hit by lightning or losing control when driving too fast over slippery roads. And while they are certainly curious about the movie Twister and are well aware of the growing market for tornado videos (see box), scientists like Davies-Jones are worried that the attention their arcane line of work is attracting may inspire people to take unwise risks. They are aware that the romance of tornado chasing has attracted a dangerous number of amateurs. Sometimes...
...more punishment than they do. During last year's VORTEX run, for example, Davies-Jones and his partners were charged with the task of placing Turtles--canisters weighted with lead and packed with temperature and pressure gauges--in the path of an oncoming tornado. As it turned out, the twister swerved and missed the Turtles. But the softball-size hailstones that followed found their mark--smashing a windshield and a rear window. Another time, Davies-Jones' partner, concentrating on a tornado that had just been sighted, slammed into a drainage ditch at 30 m.p.h...
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...
...scientific consultants on the film). They speculate, though, that most of the flying transmitters would be blown away from the vortex or destroyed by debris. Over the years, researchers have proposed all sorts of zany schemes for getting instruments into a tornado's heart, including blasting at the twister with instrumented rockets and probing it with pilotless planes. One day, no doubt, someone will try building a Dorothy-like instrument--and may even manage to make it work...
...nationwide. Already NEXRAD has helped extend the lead time for tornado warnings from three to eight minutes, on average. Sometimes the warning comes even earlier. Last month weather forecasters in Little Rock, Arkansas, called a tornado warning for communities in the Ozark Mountains a full 35 minutes before the twister showed up, giving people who lived in trailer homes time to scurry to friends' basements for safety...