Nat Geo - A deadly tornado ripped through the Oklahoma City area on Monday,
leaving 24 dead. As rescue crews assist victims, scientists have fanned
out across the Great Plains, seeking to better understand how severe
storms form, and how people may better guard against their worst
impacts.
Joshua Wurman, director of the Center for Severe Weather Research
in Boulder, Colorado, has spent the past several days in pursuit of
tornadoes across Oklahoma. "It's been a very busy time," Wurman tells
National Geographic.
And yet
many people's thinking about tornadoes is shaped as much by folk wisdom
passed down from their parents as it is by solid science. For example,
one piece of folk wisdom has it that moving to the southwest corner of a
basement or building reduces risk of injury during a tornado. There are
no data to support that, Wurman says, noting that the important thing
is to stay low and away from windows.
Wurman works with a
team of scientists to position mobile instruments as close as possible
to severe weather events. This includes Doppler on Wheels (DOW), a
Doppler radar system mounted on a truck, and instruments called Tornado
Pods, 3.3-feet-high (1-meter-high) towers that measure wind speed and
direction.
"By
having the radar up close we can get much finer resolution," says
Wurman. "It's like painting your finger at arm's length versus being
across the parking lot. The goal is trying to understand better how
tornadoes form, the 3-D structure of the winds, and how they do damage."
His work isn't all about the heart-pounding thrill of a storm chase: "Parts are very boring and tedious."
"We
eat bad food and stay in mediocre hotels," he says. "We know gas
stations and truck stops by heart, so that's not so fun. But what is fun
is to learn things that have never been known before.
Seeing inside a
tornado with this level of detail for the first time ever is like seeing
a new continent."
Wurman says that some popular
thinking about tornadoes is out of date and could even be dangerous. He
helped us assemble this list of five persistent tornado myths:
Myth #1: Tornadoes target trailer parks.
Tornadoes
do not "seek out" trailer parks more than any other neighborhoods.
Trailer parks "do have a lower threshold for being damaged," Wurman
says, which has helped lead to more media attention on those areas.
Well-built
framed houses can typically survive tornado-force winds of 120 miles
per hour (193 kilometers per hour), Wurman says. But poorly built
houses, and a lot of older mobile homes, can sustain significant damage
at those speeds because they are weaker structures.
"I've
seen that with hurricanes in Florida," Wurman says. "A trailer park was
just devastated, but wood-framed homes nearby were pretty much OK, with
just some minor roof damage, even though they saw the same winds."
He adds that much of the Midwest region known as Tornado Alley
plays host to homes that were not built up to modern codes, largely
because they are so rural that there aren't true codes or because owners
couldn't afford to follow the rules.
Myth #2: During tornadoes, drivers should shelter under overpasses.
"That might not be such a good idea because wind could accelerate under the overpass," Wurman says.
And
climbing an overpass is a definite no-no, since being up in the air
could make someone more likely to get hit by windblown debris.
