Stories tagged tornadoes
Researchers around the country are testing a new radar system that should track storms more accurately, and give earlier warning of deadly tornadoes.
Tags : Flooding in Indiana forces evacuations
Storms dumped as much as 10 inches of rain on already-soggy central Indiana on Saturday, threatening dams, inundating highways and sending the Coast Guard to rescue residents from swamped homes. (The INDY channel)
- View: Flooding Pics From Users 1
- View: Flooding Pics From Users 2
Baseball sized hail in Wisconsin
A powerful line of storms in Wisconsin dropped baseball-size hail on central and southeastern parts of the state, blowing roofs off homes and knocking down trees and power lines. CNN
Tornadoes in NW Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Chicago
The storm leveled eight barns at a turkey farm near Menahga, MN. killing thousands of turkeys. No human deaths have been reported.
Tornadoes and toilet paper: Twisters can do some really weird things
USA Today has an interesting follow-up on the Hugo tornado that struck last week. While there's a lot of massive destruction, there are also a lot of weird, finese things that happen, too.
Tornado chasing: Tornado chasers in Attica, Kansas, captured a tornado passing by their equipment.
Courtesy Center for Severe Weather ResearchWith the forces of nature kicking up violently all over the globe in recent days –– an earthquake in China, typhoon in Myanmar and volcano eruption in Chile – getting somewhat overlooked is the rash of tornadoes already this season in the United States.
A total of 98 people have died from damage caused by tornadoes in the U.S. already this year, making it the deadliest tornado season since 1998, with a lot more months of twister action to come. This year already ranks as the seventh most deadly tornado season since records began being kept in 1950.
What’s giving with all of this? As our TV meteorologists always like to remind us, it’s due to the jet stream.
That movement of air at high altitudes has been ideal for tornadoes this year, mixing warm, wet air from the Gulf of Mexico with colder-than-normal air from the Great Lakes region. Here's a cool interactive graphic that shows how tornadoes brew up.
Traditionally, May is the peak month for tornadoes in the southern U.S. while July is the prime time for twisters in the north.
Let's do the twist: Another big Tornado study to begin next year
It's been announced that the first major tornado study in the past ten years will get underway next year during the tornado season. All the details are right here. What I found especially interesting is that tornadoes in the southern U.S. are more deadly than northern tornadoes because they occur more frequently at night when people are sleeping and less likely to hear warnings. I think we were talking about that here on Buzz a while back.
You're probably like me and always felt that urban core areas were pretty safe from tornadoes. I seem to remember hearing TV meteorologists talk about an urban heat shield that deflected stormy weather around the heart of cities. But looking over this, that just might not be the case. In fact, significant tornadoes have hit large urban downtowns five times in the past 11 years.
This morning's headlines report that there are 48 dead from the squadron of tornadoes that swept across the southern U.S. last night. That seems like a huge number to me. Tornado incidents here in Minnesota in recent years rarely, if ever, have fatalities. What was so different last night down south? The news reports I've seen don't answer that question.
A wild tornado searches for prey: If only we could tame them! (image courtesy of the NOAA photo library)Techno-magician Louis Michaud believes that he can summon a tornado, “tame” it, and use the entity to generate electricity. And he intends not to simply summon a miniature steam vortex, such as can be seen in the Science Museum of Magisota’s Experiment Gallery, but a full-sized wind monster, as featured in the documentary “Twister.”
As bizarre as the idea might seem, councils of air and wind magicians at learning institutions across the country say the theory is sound. It would simply require a sorcerer of the most audacious kind. Perhaps the wizard Michaud is just that person.
The idea is based on the simple and well-known principle that tornado beasts feed and grow off of warm air. Michaud proposes summoning the tornado into a “vortex engine” using a source of hot air such as the waste heat from a nearby nuclear generator (or even, depending on geography, heat from warm tropical water). The hot air would be directed up from the vortex engine’s base in a spinning motion, and would gather momentum as it rose, eventually becoming a tornado several kilometers high. The air sucked into the tornado would spin turbines and generate electricity. The normally chaotic and destructive tornado beast would be content to stay above the vortex engine, feeding off the hot air provided. The wizard Michaud also claims that the stationary, summoned tornados could have the added benefit of combating, in some small way, the powers of That-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named (Global Warming, as it likes to be called). The vortex engines would propel hot air high into the atmosphere, where it could more easily radiate energy back into space – an interesting idea, although it seems like there would have to be countless such tornado summoning stations to have any measurable effect. Who’s to say?
However, there is a price to pay for all this, as is always the case with magic. While universities have been experimenting with the summoning spell on a small scale – luring tornados not larger that a meter or two into this realm – the facilities for commercial-scale summoning would cost somewhere on the order of $60 million. This price would be offset somewhat if the generator were built in conjunction with a nuclear power station, as the station would no longer need a $20 million cooling tower. Michaud has formed the corporation AVEtec to seek investor funding. High wizards from Oxford, Cambridge, and MIT have joined AVEtec’s advisory board.
Those of you less experienced in the magical arts might be well served by this article, or this one, both of which offer a more scientific perspective.
Weather spotters needed
in Earth and Space Science, Scientific Inquiry, The Water Cycle, Weather and Climate, and Forces of Nature
Ever wanted to be a storm spotter? Now's your chance! The National Weather Service (NWS) relies on local SKYWARN storm spotters to confirm, from the ground, what meteorologists are seeing on radar. NWS storm spotters are not tornado chasers like the folks in the movie "Twister." Instead, they report wind gusts, hail size, rainfall, cloud formations, and the like to NWS and local emergency management agencies.
Tornado: This tornado, seen in its early stages of formation over Union City, Oklahoma (May 24, 1973), was the first one caught by the National Severe Storms Laboratory doppler radar and chase personnel. (Photo courtesy NOAA Photo Library, NOAA Central Library; OA
New radar equipment is still not sensitive enough to determine the existence of an actual tornado. It can only predict where severe weather is likely to occur. So the NWS needs trained volunteers to verify actual severe weather.
With peak storm season just around the corner (mid-June here in the Upper Midwest), free, 2.5-hour classes are being offered to train new SkyWarn volunteers.
SkyWarn class schedule, greater Minnesota
SkyWarn class schedule, Twin Cities Metro area
Tornado: Image courtesy NOAA Photo Library, NOAA Central Library; OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL)
Tornado season is here for those of us living in the Midwest. Tornadoes fascinate me – they’re so incredibly powerful and stunning and scary all at once. I used to have all sorts of elaborate emergency escape plans to the basement when I was a kid, and even had a pecking order for what prized possessions I would save and how. I also remember as a kid being told that if there was the threat of a tornado to open up a window a crack before heading to the basement so that the pressure inside the house would normalize with the pressure outside generated by the tornado thus preventing the roof from being blown off. I did this all the way up until last summer – but no more.
It turns out that a majority of damage to homes is the result of wind blowing into open (or broken) windows pushing up on the roof at the same time as winds are blowing over and under them, generating a lifting force, which increases the chances of the roof being blown off. So, all this time I’ve been making my house less safe, rather than safer. Doh.
Although it is likely wishful thinking on my part to hope that a single pane of glass is going to remain intact during a tornado, especially with all the debris that will be flying around. It makes more sense to close them to keep the rain out than to save the house from tornado damage, but it feels good to do something during those times when you have no real control. Better still to just forget the windows and get to the basement. With my most prized possessions.
For more information on tornadoes, and tornado safety, check out these sites:
Tornado Project Online
NOAA’s online Tornado FAQ
Weather.com’s Tornado page
Science Buzz and all related activities
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