Andy Wallace: Dude, this is one of those days where I was like, this is going to go early.
Mike Olbinski: I mean, it's going to be—we're going to have—we have to have a good storm tonight.
Because right now the hail cores are kind of here.
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Melanie Metz: Even it's kind of shows some clustering a little bit.
Brian Emfinger: There’s a little bit of a lowering right there right now.
Wallace: It's reforming again. I think you may need to move east just to get out of the construction zone.
Olbinski: The rain's coming. I think we should move.
Wallace: Right toward us. Okay, tighten up. Make it work.
Emfinger: Okay, so be ready to—be ready to get the hell out of here.
Brett Wright: Uh, it’s still going. I see the left edge there I think.
Emfinger: That's it right there. You gotta get out of here.
Henry DaCosta: Do you want to start with the other program?
Leigh Orf: Yeah, the interactive one. Sure. Then you can sort of see me doing science. Scientists working hard at science.
Jana Houser: In the most violent tornadoes, you first need to have a rotating thunderstorm, which we refer to in meteorology as a supercell. Specific atmospheric conditions need to be present.
Amy McGovern: Supercells need moisture and wind shear.
Orf: Usually you have a low-pressure system coming off the lee of the Rockies, causing southerly wind that's bringing moist air from the Gulf up towards, say, the Great Plains.
Houser: A situation where you have warm and moist air at low levels and then cold air above that. This creates a scenario that promotes instability.
Wallace: So now you shot the air up, right with the instability and you've made it turn with the shear. And so you've created what we call a supercell.
Orf: So your supercell forms.You're in that one of those zones where everything's perfect, right? You've got these towering cumulus clouds going up into the sky and overshooting top. You can see it bubbling up, and you have an anvil as it spreads out because that air has to go somewhere.
Houser: On top of that, you need to have a strong enough updraft above that area of rotation, kind of like a vacuum sucks that rotation upward.
Then like an ice skater who spins slowly when her arms are out, when she pulls her arms together, she spins faster. The air behaves in the same way.
Orf: From that point on, it's an amplification process.
The next question you might want to ask is now explain a storm that doesn't form a tornado because they look almost the same.
Jamey Jacob: My focus, as the director of the Unmanned Systems Research Institute, is to develop novel autonomous systems technology with a focus on weather application.
And what drones allow us to do is to be able to essentially lick our finger and stick it up in the air and be able to measure those really important parameters and then take that information and use it in the storm-prediction models.
Yeah—the outstanding question is, you know, why does one supercell form a tornado when another one does not?
There's so many unknown variables in terms of how this complex system forms and its dynamics that we can't get until we actually are there, able to measure this data.
McGovern: There's a tremendous amount of data out there. There's more and more growing all the time.
We put up new satellite systems. We've got crowd-sensing systems that are out there, data that's coming and streaming in, and it's overloading.
It's overloading the forecasters. It's overloading anybody who's trying to make a decision. And AI is perfect for trying to sift through all of that data and try to identify the most important parts of it and help you make your decisions.
My explanation of AI, when I'm explaining it to lots of people, is to explain Google Maps. Google Maps is an AI.
I want to get directions from point A to point B. There are hundreds of millions of choices between point A and point B, most of the time. The AI is being used to find the best route for you. It's an intelligent search mechanism.
Machine learning is doing adaptation on top of all that, so taking in lots and lots of data, and you're adapting your answers over time based on what the environment is doing.
And so in our case with storms, we're looking at all the data. Can you identify a pattern in there that is going to predict the storm?
If you're trying to find a face, right, you're going to look for the features that we know exist in the face, eyes, nose, ears, mouth. You're going to find that face.
Those same kinds of features translate to storms. So you're going to look for areas of high precipitation. You’re gonna look for areas with, if you have lightning data, you could look for areas with lightning.
So you're going to look for areas of high precipitation. You’re gonna look for areas with, if you have lightning data, you could look for areas with lightning.
So there are lots of features like that that you can look for that indicate what's happening in the atmosphere but show up on the radar.
Robin Tanamachi: I'm an assistant professor of atmospheric science here in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University.
My research concerns mainly radar-based studies of severe convective storms and tornadoes. So I use radar as a tool to see inside of thunderstorms and see what they're actually doing.
A radar works by sending out pulses of microwave energy into the atmosphere.
So you can kind of think of it as a piano sitting on a stage, and somebody goes up to the piano and starts plinking a single key. Just plink, plink, plink. You hear the echo off of the seats and off of the balconies in the theater.
That pulse of microwave energy goes out into the atmosphere. It interacts with rain particles or snow particles, insects, birds, airplanes, anything that's out in the atmosphere.
And then a very tiny fraction of that energy gets scattered back to the radar, where it's received, amplified and displayed.
Orf: Simulation work is complementary to the observational. That sort of ties into what I consider in meteorology the three pillars of the research stool: Theory, which is the mathematics and understanding the physics and sort of doing mathematical derivations; observations, which is going out and observing storms, whether it be with radar or satellite or just humans and cars; and then simulation and modeling work. You'll find those three things are involved in almost all aspects of meteorology.
And in my mind, you can't focus too much on any one of those. You really need to focus on all three.
Those processes, separately, each has some pretty serious limitations, but you bring them together and suddenly—an observation that you see in the atmosphere shows up in the model. Oh good. The model is probably not wrong. The model shows up with a feature you'd never seen before. We find it in the atmosphere. That's great, too. That means we're all doing the right thing.
Shawn Triplett: I got matched up to be a local guide for a photojournalist from Bloomberg. And then, at the end of our little mini tour of the downtown area, we stopped accidentally here at the American Legion Theater.
This is real sombering, I guess—you know, it was of all the chaos and the noise throughout the town and all the people working in the trucks and the tractors and everything, it was total silence here.
It looked like a bombing campaign. You know, the three times that I've been deployed, I had never seen that much destruction in my life.
Chris Bullock: My name is Chris Bullock, and I've lived in Dawson since I was seven years old. So we were in the basement for about two minutes before it hit.
Then things kind of happened quickly, but in slow motion. Above us, the brick wall, it came in on us. It had my son and I pinned. Nobody was saying anything at this point.
My husband gets up, and of course, there's no light except from the lightning. He says the house is gone. The whole house is gone. Everything's gone.
Wallace: You know, when the storm sirens go off in a town that's had that happen, they've learned, and they pay very close attention. And people get nervous. I mean, there's the science and then there's the people that lived through it that, okay, we've got to start from scratch.
Houser: There has been evidence to suggest that the number of days that tornadoes will occur will actually go down. You know, maybe on a given year, there's 100 days that produce tornadoes in our climate change scenarios that might be reduced to 85. But what we are seeing is that on those 85 days, it's more volatile. So we have larger outbreaks and fewer days where you're just seeing, you know, a handful of tornadoes.
Tanamachi: So what we've been seeing over the last 30 or 40 years is a, is a statistically significant shift in the frequency of tornadoes being maximized over the central plains of the United States more toward the southeast United States. So areas like Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama are seeing more and more frequent tornadoes.
McGovern: The climate is changing, and we know that. And as the climate is changing, the weather is changing, and we need to be able to improve our resiliency.
Houser: I feel like my work is to help us get to the point where we can really be right on with our tornado warning system, and it just establishes that we need to, we need to do better.
Where we're at now is, is good and it's better than we were 30 years ago, but there's still a lot of false alarms.
Wallace: Is there, is there one thing that tips us over from a storm not producing a tornado to a tornado? Is there something where we go, whoa—that—warning, just do it?
And everybody wants to crack the code. You want to be the one to do it. It won’t be me, but somebody's going to.