Low-Frequency Sound Can Reveal That a Tornado Is On Its Way (bbc.com) 54
Scientists are exploring infrasound, low-frequency sound waves produced by tornadoes to develop more accurate early warning systems for these destructive storms. The hope is that eavesdropping on infrasound signals, which travel for hundreds of miles, could provide up to two hours of advance warning. The BBC reports: Scientists have been listening to tornadoes and trying to work out whether they produce a unique sound since the 1970s. Experimental evidence suggests that low-frequency infrasound, with a frequency range of 1-10Hz , is produced while a tornado is taking shape and throughout its life. One recent set of measurements from a tornado near Lakin, Kansas in May 2020 revealed that the twister produced a distinct, elevated signal between 10Hz and 15Hz. In some cases arrays of infrasound detecting microphones have been shown to pick up the noise produced by tornadoes from more than 100km (60 miles) away and have also indicated that the infrasound is produced before tornadogenesis even begins. Researchers hope that by eavesdropping on these noises, it may be possible to not only hear a tornado coming but perhaps even predict them up to two hours before they form.
Since 2020, a team from Oklahoma State University has been testing infrasound's predictive powers using equipment installed in tornado-chasing vehicles. Their portable kit, the Ground-based Local Infrasound Data Acquisition, or "Glinda", system, references a character from The Wizard of Oz. They hope the equipment will help storm chasers to better monitor the development of tornadoes in real time, but requires the equipment to be deployed to the right place at the right time. Some researchers, however, are working on systems that can be left to permanently monitor for tornadoes. One group, led by Roger Waxler, principal scientist at the National Centre for Physical Acoustics (NCPA) based at the University of Mississippi, are planning to deploy four permanent arrays of high-tech sensors in south Mississippi to detect infrasound signals. They hope the system will provide a way of consistently monitoring and detecting tornadoes.
[...] Waxler and his team hope their decade-long experiment will lead to an effective early warning system for tornadoes, particularly when combined with other sources such as doppler radar. "It's not unreasonable that we could localize a tornado to half a football field," adds Waxler. "I envision seeing a map on an app with a dot that shows there's a tornado coming up South Lamar [Avenue, for example]." Warnings have improved in recent decades: from 2003 to 2017, 87% of deadly tornadoes were preceded by an advance warning, but people still have an average of just 10-15 minutes to find shelter. A study based on interviews with 23 survivors of two deadly tornadoes found that people tried to evaluate and respond to the risk of a tornado as the situation evolved, but some did not have a place to shelter easily. Experts believe tornado warnings are too often ignored due to "warning fatigue" created by false alarms and hours of televised storm coverage. One study found 37% of people surveyed did not understand the need for taking precautionary measures during a tornado warning. Waxler hopes that a more accurate early warning system could change the way people respond when they hear a storm is approaching. "Rather than going to hide in your bathtub or cellar, it might be a better idea to get in your car and drive if you know where a tornado is. "The goal is to save lives."
Since 2020, a team from Oklahoma State University has been testing infrasound's predictive powers using equipment installed in tornado-chasing vehicles. Their portable kit, the Ground-based Local Infrasound Data Acquisition, or "Glinda", system, references a character from The Wizard of Oz. They hope the equipment will help storm chasers to better monitor the development of tornadoes in real time, but requires the equipment to be deployed to the right place at the right time. Some researchers, however, are working on systems that can be left to permanently monitor for tornadoes. One group, led by Roger Waxler, principal scientist at the National Centre for Physical Acoustics (NCPA) based at the University of Mississippi, are planning to deploy four permanent arrays of high-tech sensors in south Mississippi to detect infrasound signals. They hope the system will provide a way of consistently monitoring and detecting tornadoes.
[...] Waxler and his team hope their decade-long experiment will lead to an effective early warning system for tornadoes, particularly when combined with other sources such as doppler radar. "It's not unreasonable that we could localize a tornado to half a football field," adds Waxler. "I envision seeing a map on an app with a dot that shows there's a tornado coming up South Lamar [Avenue, for example]." Warnings have improved in recent decades: from 2003 to 2017, 87% of deadly tornadoes were preceded by an advance warning, but people still have an average of just 10-15 minutes to find shelter. A study based on interviews with 23 survivors of two deadly tornadoes found that people tried to evaluate and respond to the risk of a tornado as the situation evolved, but some did not have a place to shelter easily. Experts believe tornado warnings are too often ignored due to "warning fatigue" created by false alarms and hours of televised storm coverage. One study found 37% of people surveyed did not understand the need for taking precautionary measures during a tornado warning. Waxler hopes that a more accurate early warning system could change the way people respond when they hear a storm is approaching. "Rather than going to hide in your bathtub or cellar, it might be a better idea to get in your car and drive if you know where a tornado is. "The goal is to save lives."
Long ago (Score:5, Informative)
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Agreed, this was well-known when I lived in tornado alley in the 60's, and I know that Kansas State had a system they used to detect it at the time.
Sound localizing this (Score:4, Interesting)
So if you are able to find a USB microphone that can hear this infrasound then maybe you can use my sound localizating project with success from a long way away.
https://github.com/hcfman/sbts... [github.com]
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I wonder if you'll be able to trigger false storm warnings with a giant subwoofer.
Maybe they'll have have to outlaw playing "Back that azz up" by Juvenile at high volumes in Oklahoma to prevent a mass panic caused by it's epic bass line.
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Yeah, there's the other thing. You would have to train it on a couple of thousand samples. But then likely it wouldn't get confused. But who knows till you try it. I can localize fireworks explosions to a small area in a specific car park from several kilometers away. In essense if you can hear it from all the microphones and the area is within the polygon of microphones you can localize it.
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Yeah, there's the other thing. You would have to train it on a couple of thousand samples. But then likely it wouldn't get confused. But who knows till you try it. I can localize fireworks explosions to a small area in a specific car park from several kilometers away. In essense if you can hear it from all the microphones and the area is within the polygon of microphones you can localize it.
Interesting you mention training. Wouldn't this data be an potential candidate for an AI model? It's a bunch of somewhat noisy (to a human) data that is already labeled.
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Yes, that’s exactly what I mean by training. The data is already labelled principal it should be able to make it working system of a year. I would expect.
I have ambitions to make a similar system for a different kind of sound event.
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I wonder if you'll be able to trigger false storm warnings with a giant subwoofer.
Maybe they'll have have to outlaw playing "Back that azz up" by Juvenile at high volumes in Oklahoma to prevent a mass panic caused by it's epic bass line.
Exactly what I was thinking with maybe one more little twist. Somebody could maybe have an area evacuated because a mega-tornado is coming and then go there to rob and grab everything they want and can.
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Probably not with just a regular off-the-shelf consumer subwoofer. It would probably have to be something custom.
Serious Business (Score:2)
"37% of people surveyed did not understand the need for taking precautionary measures during a tornado warning"
So what, did they think these are just for fun? It's amazing how little awareness some people have of the world. It's easier than ever to see the potential for devastation tornadoes can have.
Maybe someone should show them one of my favorite (horrifying) tornado videos of the Prarie Creek Elementary School in Andover, KS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
And here is an alternate drone view of the sa
Re:Serious Business (Score:5, Insightful)
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Those 150 mph 2x4 spears would never hit me!
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If something bad does happen, it's someone else's fault. Probably immigrants.
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Brick is not tornado-proof (and yes, even all-brick, not just brick veneer). Plus, you have doors, windows, and a roof on a building.
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Have you ever seen (in person) buildings hit by a tornado? There's not really a quality issue. One friend's house was picked up (yes, it was anchored to the foundation) and put back down - little visible damage actually, until the next day when the doors and windows no longer worked because the tornado shifted it slightly off the foundation.
It's not just raw wind speed that's the problem, either. The air pressure changes within a tornado do weird things. Once the roof is ripped off, the insides get sucked r
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What you are ignoring: it only takes one tiny flaw in all that brick and mortar for a single wall to be compromised, and then it's an accelerating domino chain from there to every single brick becoming a high speed projectile capable of making many more flaws in many more sections of brick wall, causing more projectiles, more damage, etc. until you end up with a complete structural collapse of multiple tons of bricks flying about at high speed at your face.
No thanks. This isn't a fairy tale of pigs trying
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My point is that you seem to think that nobody ever thought of this before you came along to make such a brave suggestion in a fucking Slashdot thread.
Do you really think nobody every thought to try to see if brick construction offers a reasonable improvement in structural resistance to high winds and tornadoes? And do you think that if there was a statistically significant improvement in safety and resilience, that affected geographies would have updated building codes to match the new data?
Or do you thin
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Re: Serious Business (Score:2)
Most American "brick" houses are just wood with veneer brick and construction adhesive.
Re: Serious Business (Score:2)
Pretending you can build your way out of tornado destruction is foolish.
Try reinforced concrete using proper rebar, ICF forms, and a concrete roof deck. 95% of tornadoes are ET3 or below... and reinforced concrete (roof and all) plus Florida-code missile-rated impact-glass windows will make it through those with barely a scratch. EF4 & 5 are monsters... but even in "tornado alley", they're exceptionally rare.
If Kansas had Dade County building codes, most tornadoes would barely make a dent (in neighborhoods built to Dade County standards) instead of destroying neighborhoods
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Since you've never been through a tornado, just because a brick house is left standing does not mean the rest of it is intact. The wind will lift the roof off [popularmechanics.com] a house or blow out windows and doors (or both) and once that happens everything inside is fair game. If your stuff can't get out through an opening it swirls around at high speed acting like 2 grit sandpaper. Holes are punched into walls, wiring is damaged or destroyed, p
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Plus, you have doors, windows, and a roof on a building.
So make the windows and roof out of brick as well.
But seriously, just build things more robustly. (OK, building codes, regulations, Republicans. I get it.) I am amazed at how many storm shutters in tornado and hurricane country are fake.
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My god, you solved the problem of tornado alley!
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Cool, we'll just abandon about 20% of the most fertile agricultural land on the planet because of some inconvenient storms. That seems like something that will happen.
Next you'll bitch about the trillions of dollars it will take to forcefully relocate entire cities of people out of danger in a swath of land from Central Texas to the North Dakota southern border, as wide as Nebraska is from west to east? Oh, but that wouldn't be enough because tornadoes, once formed, tend to move with the storm that spawne
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You do know that tornados create more air pressure differential than an angry big bad wolf, don't you, little piggie?
A brick house in a tornado sounds like a recipe for making several thousand very hard projectiles fly very fast in every direction.
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My point is that your suggestion of building a brick home and thinking it's somehow tornado-proof or even tornado-resistant is silly, and if there was any meaningful protective quality, don't you think that the entirety of tornado alley would have rebuilt using brick by now?
Or do you think that basically everyone living across a multitude of states, including the Ph. D. researchers at the various universities that study such things just completely overlooked thousands of years of history of building things
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While they've worked to better localize warnings, they're also issuing warnings for a lot more storms, when there's just an indication of rotation on radar (with no way to tell if it has or ever will reach the ground). You reach a point where there's just so many warnings, it's hard to get excited about another one.
A friend of mine was killed by a tornado, so I take them seriously; but even I get kind of "blah" about warnings a lot of the time.
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While they've worked to better localize warnings, they're also issuing warnings for a lot more storms, when there's just an indication of rotation on radar (with no way to tell if it has or ever will reach the ground). You reach a point where there's just so many warnings, it's hard to get excited about another one.
I'm assuming you're confusing tornado watches with tornado warnings. Watches mean the conditions are favorable for a tornado. Warnings mean that there has been either a spotting or the radar has flat out showed a tornado proper (source [weather.gov]). Watches, I, personally, take with a grain of salt, but when we get warnings (rare as they are in my area [NE Indiana]), I get my pets and I into the basement.
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No, I'm referring to tornado warnings. They issue warnings when there's a rotation signature on radar, which does not mean there's a tornado on the ground. I understand why they do that (because it can go from "rotation in the cloud" to "tornado on the ground" in moments)... but it leads to a number of warnings with no tornado, which leads to people not paying attention to the warnings as much.
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The bible belt and southern states in particular do fall behind in education. Probably a good chunk of flat earthers in that group too.
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And 63% just figured that it meant "run outside with your phone and record it".
I already noticed (Score:2)
You just have to turn up the bass to 11 on the weather channel.
News From 1961! (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been wondering if there was any news since then.
Well we know the Republican response. (Score:1)
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Oblig... (Score:2)
Tornado Alert System (Score:2)
There was a Device called the "Tornado Alert System" that was sold in the 90s that would supposedly detect tornadoes via infrasound. Can't find anything online about it or even if it worked but here's one on eBay.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/27561... [ebay.com]
It even had a patent.
https://patents.google.com/pat... [google.com]
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But that is non directional. It tells you that there is a tornado, but not where. Arrays that can communicate can localize the storm somewhat. So, less false alarms. This is one case where an old idea with "using the Internet" appis is useful.
When I watched Twister... (Score:1)
Hoping not as stupid as nuking a hurricane sounds (Score:2)
is it a 'cause' or a 'correlation'? I do not know.
but seriously asking, any chance of using active noise cancellation techniques to emit focused infrasound
could be reasonably disruptive enough to turn the hurricane focus into an unfocused pandemonium? Just reduce potential.
Not to overwhelm the entire weather pattern, I get why the scale makes that impossible,
but maybe just enough to take the edge off the strongest tip and drop it's effects by a safir scale point??
New Scientific Breakthrough! (Score:2)
Microphones can detect the effects of air moving!
Anyone else get the feeling some 'scientists' needed to get something published before they could take the rest of the year off?
Twister reboot (Score:1)
Every part of this post feels like a viral marketing campaign for a twister reboot. There are even two competing research teams and equipment that needs placed just right.
That makes more sense. (Score:2)
Low-Frequency Sound Can Reveal That a Tornado Is On Its Way
[*cleans glasses*] I initially thought that said "tomato".