blackbearnh writes "If you've watched the Discovery Channel series "Storm Chasers", you'll be familiar with Dr. Joshua Wurman and his Doppler on Wheels radar, which he uses to study tornadoes up close and personal every spring. O'Reilly Media spent some time last week speaking to Dr. Wurman about what it takes, technologically, to operate a weather radar in 100 mile per hour winds in the middle of a lightening storm. They also talked about the value of this kind of research to both tornado and hurricane research, and how having a film crew around during missions affects the science. "Most severe rotating thunderstorms don't make tornadoes and there are subtleties that we don't really understand about the structure of those storms or about the environment that they're going into which are affecting whether they make no tornadoes, weak tornadoes or the very few that make strong tornadoes. And we think it's some combination of the structure of the storm and the temperatures of the air in and outside of the storm that are making those differences. And we hope that by surrounding these super cells with multiple radars and in situ instruments and cars with instruments that we can learn enough about the interaction between the temperatures in the environment, the precipitation field, the rain and hail in a storm and the wind fields in those storms to know which particular structures--which particular environments are likely to make strong tornadoes as compared to the majority of environments which result in a no tornado at all."" Link to Original Source
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