Word: vortexes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...night, the contrast couldn't be greater. From the main Yard through the gates to Memorial Hall, a pedestrian is surrounded by the dark vortex, another rainy autumn night...
...west, and people smarter than I started leaving. Shortly after 2, a wild cloud formation appeared about half a mile to the west. Great white fingers developed from the left and right and flowed quickly toward a black, horizontally rolling cloud, which lifted to reveal a huge, whirling black vortex coming straight at me. I threw myself to the ground but couldn't help watching. The outside of the tornado was spinning so fast my eye couldn't follow it, but the inside was rotating almost lazily. I could see a thousand feet up inside it. Tiny fingers of lightning...
...Until VORTEX, the competing hypotheses about tornado formation could not be rigorously tested. The downdraft theory, for example, was bolstered by storm chasers' sightings. Observes Erik Rasmussen, field coordinator for VORTEX: "What storm chasers see first is a big dark cloud, then a bright spiral slicing into the base." The problem is that the flow of air within a big storm is so complex that what the eye sees cannot always be trusted. Hence the need for measurements...
Rasmussen and his colleagues are just beginning to work their way through the VORTEX data, and they cannot yet say how well the different models are faring. Like all successful experiments, VORTEX has produced more questions than answers, and later 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...
...first stated by 14th century philosopher William of Ockham. According to this principle, the theories most likely to prove true are those shorn of unnecessary embellishments. But, says Texas A&M meteorologist Louis Wicker, the process of tornado formation now looks more complicated than ever. In fact, the more VORTEX data sets he feeds into his computer models, the more convinced he is that there could be several ways to make a tornado. "Nature," he laughs, "has kicked us in the pants...