Word: western
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gene Moore is scanning the cloudy skies, pulling on a cigarette, adjusting the treble on his stereo and aiming his blue Ford pickup truck toward western Oklahoma...
...word of storms moving east from the border near the Texas Panhandle. It has already loosed four aircraft, including one armor-plated job equipped to penetrate the severest storms. Six special Doppler radars, which are sensitive even to frequency changes in falling raindrops, have been focused on the western part of the state. And three storm chase vehicles like Moore's are rolling westward...
...alto-cumulus clouds begin to cast shadows across the truck stops and red-dirt farm lands of western Oklahoma. Moore and his aide, Bill Moyer, another O.U. meteorology student, keep peering at the sky, noting the cloud peaks tilting to the southeast, indicating that jet-stream winds are active. "That's good," Moore notes, "real good." Two essential ingredients for a tornadic storm seem to be present, and just as surely moving inexorably toward a showdown. If the cold, swift-moving jet-stream wind persists and clashes with the warm, moist lower air from the south, the atmosphere will...
Within minutes, the western sky has turned a stunning emerald green, and huge hailstones are smashing on the truck's roof. It is 6:16 p.m. Moore pushes east as the hailstones, some of them literally the size of golf balls, threaten to crack our windshield. After plowing through a curtain of hail and rain, the truck turns south and breaks through the devastating storm. As it rolls through tiny Covington (pop. 605), every light in town blinks off and on, twice, because of storm-blown power lines. "Look for an escape route," Moore warns Moyer...
Geothermal. Iceland already gets much of its energy from the earth's hot interior, and DOE analysts believe that many Western states could start to follow this example. Geothermal energy exists in volcanoes, geysers and hot springs, and can be tapped by sinking wells roughly 2,000 ft. into the reservoirs of superheated water and steam that are sandwiched between layers of rock close to the earth's molten lava. Steam rises to the surface, where it can be used to power turbines that generate electricity, and is then allowed to flow back underground for natural reheating...