yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Upturning Tornadoes | Explorers in the Field


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Okay, 23:33, 21 coming straight for us. Oh my gosh! As a longtime storm researcher and storm chaser, I'm very interested in the dynamics of the formation of some of the strongest storms on earth.

[Music] [Music]

My name is Anton Simon. I'm an atmospheric and environmental scientist and National Geographic Explorer. Something about the age of eight, I’d go to the library by myself and take out all the books on things that fascinated me, reading everything I could.

What fascinated me back then? Things like mountaineering, great big storms, volcanoes. Guess what? All these years later, look at what I'm doing! It's not a surprise. I've had to confront things that used to be childhood fears. I've always been terrified of heights, even to the present day. But I can climb mountains because I've learned to deal with it.

Similarly, I used to be quite terrified of storms. Perhaps what that fear comes from is a fascination, and that fascination compels you to want to understand, you know, what it is and why they are so scary.

A tornado is a rapidly rotating column of air that is spawned by a much larger system: a very intense rotating thunderstorm we call a supercell. Thanks to great scientific advances, we have a very good understanding of how supercell thunderstorms form, but we don't yet have a good understanding of how tornadoes form from supercell storms. The better we can understand storm formation, the better we can predict tornadoes.

Now, we're trying to understand how a tornado forms. Number one: a layer of warm moist air near the Earth's surface flowing beneath a layer of much drier air further up. Number two: wind shear, which is the change of wind with increasing height. A buildup of heat creates atmospheric instability which drives the updraft. As the air rises rapidly, it also changes direction, introducing a twisting motion. Eventually, the rotation can later allow a tornado to form.

So, your typical tornado is not large; it's typically on the order of maybe 100 meters at the surface. However, on occasion, conditions will allow much, much larger circulations to form. The largest tornado on record, which we've studied, was the El Reno storm of 2013. El Reno, Oklahoma, the tornado grew to the largest I've mentioned ever seen anywhere in the world—more than four kilometers, just two and a half miles wide.

Working with tornadic storms took a very tragic turn in 2013 when the El Reno storm occurred, and I lost my former research teammates. Unfortunately, his car was overtaken by the tornado, and three people were killed. So, we went through a personal tragedy: the loss of great friends and colleagues.

But we've taken that very, very sad episode, recognizing an opportunity in that to actually advance tornado science by better understanding the storm that caused the disaster. So, we reached out on social media. We did what we call crowdsourcing, which is going on social media and requesting, "Hey, were you there? Did you see something interesting? Would you be willing to share it with us?"

Then from that, this huge discovery comes forth. We were able to answer this long-held question: Did tornadoes develop from the cloud downward or from the ground outward? The answer, at least in the case of the world's largest tornado, unquestionably, it formed from the ground and grew upward into the parent thundercloud.

That was a really big discovery that we never expected. Better understanding of storms ultimately benefits the public. If we can improve warnings and that type of thing, the other reason that I'm doing it is because I simply love it. There’s an enormous personal reward for doing it, and I'll never pretend that I need another reason other than that to do this.

Congratulations, team! Long time coming. I hope it didn't hurt anyone. That was so beautiful.

[Music]

More Articles

View All
How to Identify a Bull Shark | Raging Bull Shark
NARRATOR: Researchers have confirmed 100 bull shark attacks. But the real number may be much higher because the bull shark is so difficult to identify. When you first look at a bull shark, it doesn’t really jump out at you that it’s a bull shark. It just …
Devil's Club Harvest | Port Protection
On smokes, we’re cutting through here. Timby Porter is scouring the woods looking for devil’s club, a plant with pain-killing properties. I hear noises over there, but a sound in the bush ahead has brought her hunt to an anxious halt. “Smokey, you hear b…
A tour inside the vampish G450 of @sandracorinna #sckaviation#gulfstreamG450
How much did it cost you to do the complete airplane? Over 5.5 million? Wow, wow, wow! I mean, you like it? It’s amazing! I don’t know if I feel like James Bond or Dr. Evil; it’s unbelievable. Catwoman? Oh, Catwoman! Sorry, tell me about it. I went for …
Warren Buffett: How Most People Should Invest in 2023
Since 1965, Warren Buffett, the world’s best investor, has been laser-focused on buying individual stocks and trying to beat the market to benefit the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. And he’s done that very successfully, with an average annual return …
Constitutional powers of the president | American civics | US government and civics | Khan Academy
So this is here, um, I’m here with Jeffrey Rosen, head of the National Constitution Center, and we’re going to talk about Article Two of the United States Constitution. So, Jeffrey, what does Article Two deal with? It deals with the executive power, the…
NEW FED STIMULUS WARNING | FREE MONEY + INFINITE SPENDING
What’s up, you guys? It’s Graham here. So today, I’m going to be pulling a Meet Kevin and posting a brand new video within hours of a market update. And today, that update comes from none other than Jerome Powell, who is the chairman of the Federal Reserv…