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Tim Samaras: Since I was a kid, I've always been interested in storms. As an
engineer I try to understand how things work. So, I actually
built and designed a device to measure the weather, basically,
on the inside of a tornado.
The United States on average gets about
1200 tornadoes per year. And the reason is, is because of its unique
geographic location. You got the Gulf of Mexico off
to the South, and theses storm systems as they pass through draw
this Golf moisture as water vapor and comes right up through the Midwest. And
spring time generally reflects a very, what we call a very active jet stream
and it brings us a very powerful winds that
just comes right across the Midwest. That combination allows
these big storm systems to develop and of course wind shear is a very powerful ingredient
for a tornado. The ingredients for a tornado
obviously are quite complex but some of the basics are,
you have to have moisture, you have to have lift and then the
other most important ingredient is what they call wind shear. And
shear creates these big horizontal rolls in the atmosphere.
And then when a thunderstorm forms underneath it, it actually tips these
horizontal rolls in a vertical position to where a thunderstorm forms
over them, you have the whole thunderstorm rotating. Those final
processes are what we're trying to study.
What's bringing the rotation finally all the way to the ground and that's
really one of the biggest mysteries of tornado formation.
You know its very difficult to forecast where a tornadoes going to be. When we're actually in
the field, waiting for thunderstorms to develop, we use what they call visible
satellite imagery. This is basically a picture from space, showing
the best areas, what we call instability, and that's how and where
we are able to target these storms that are developing.
Ground-based radar can't even see these storms develop, but satellite can.
Satellites also detect what we call boundaries.
These boundaries, left over from old thunderstorms, become the
focus of new thunderstorms during the day and actually enhance
the tornado potential. Visible satellite technology allows us to
identify this, which otherwise would be going totally
unnoticed and undetected. One of the biggest
things that I would love to see in future satellite technology is the
ability to actually see lightning within the cloud tops. All the
vertical motion and so forth greatly enhances the ability to create lightening.
This lightning mapping will actually show frequency. If the storm is
becoming severe, the lightning frequency increases and thus being
able to do an early detection of whether or not that storm is severe or not.
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If we knew more
about tornado genesis and structure and we're able to stretch that warning out to twenty or
twenty five minutes, right now the average time is about fifteen minutes or so,
that gives people more time to prepare and seek shelter.
Without the GOES satellite we would be back in the dark ages of the mid to early
sixties. These GOES satellites are responsible, in my opinion, for saving
many many thousands of lives.