A year in ‘Tornado Alley’

Peak tornado activity is occurring earlier in the heart of Tornado Alley

Tornado frequency may increase as the factors that contribute to severe convection are altered by a changing climate. Attributing changes in tornado frequency to observed global climate change is complicated because observational effort has increased over time, but studies of the seasonal distribution of tornado activity may avoid sampling biases. We demonstrate that peak tornado activity has s...

Oscillations of a Giant Solar Tornado

Solar magnetic tornadoes are known to be one of the mass and energy transport mechanisms from the lower solar atmosphere into the upper layers of the solar corona. A bright spiral structure with two arms is observed using high-cadence EUV images of 171, 193 and 304 Ǻ channels of Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) aboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) on 10th of July 2011 for three hours. ...

Tornado Forecasting: A Review

Present-day operational tornado forecasting can be thought of in two parts: anticipation of tornadic potential in the storm environment, and recognition of tornadic storms once they develop. The former is a forecasting issue, while the latter is associated with warnings (or so-called nowcasting). This paper focuses on the forecasting aspect of tornadoes1, by dealing primarily with the relations...

Tornado Warnings and Tornado Fatalities : The Case of May 22 , 2011 Tornado in Joplin , Missouri

"What is learned?"--A theoretical blind alley.

The pursuit of knowledge frequently has been hampered by misdirection. Questions lacking any possibility of being answered experimentally are often considered to be empirically meaningful. In many instances this inherent lack of meaning is so well hidden that much time and effort is wasted on attempted answers. The history of psychology has contained many such cases of "meaningless questions"; ...