Word: vortexes
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...movie, Dorothy is packed with golf ball-size radio transmitters that are supposed to fly up into the vortex and relay data to ground-based computers. The idea is not all that farfetched, according to real-life storm chasers (some of whom acted as 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...
...system has not changed the rate of false alarms: 50% to 70% of the warnings forecasters issue are not followed by tornadoes. Why does one threatening-looking storm produce a tornado while others seemingly just like it do not? This question has dogged tornado experts for years, and the VORTEX project was launched to answer it. First in 1994 and again in 1995, VORTEX brought dozens of meteorologists to Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas during May and June--peak tornado season in that part of the country. Every few days for nearly 10 weeks, chase teams piled into planes, vans...
...VORTEX scientists managed to encircle 10 tornadoes in their virtual lasso, and the data they recorded--wind speed, temperature, pressure, humidity--have turned out to be extraordinarily rich. "We got more good data out of VORTEX," exclaims Peter Hildebrand of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, "than we had collected in the past 30 years." Among other things, the chase teams managed to position a Turtle so it actually caught the sharp pressure drop as a VORTEX passed overhead; tucked into the center of the tornado's swirling interior, a cylinder of down-flowing air that...
...Before VORTEX, scientists had a general idea of how tornadoes come to be. They knew, for example, that big twisters are most likely to be generated by what are termed supercell storms--towering cloud structures that sometimes top out at 65,000 ft. and concentrate energy in dangerous ways. Supercells typically form in spring as warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico flows north and pushes through colder, dryer layers of air. As it rises, this upwelling of warm air begins to cool, and the moisture it contains condenses first into cloud droplets and then into rain. At that...
...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...