3D Visualization of the Anatomy of a Tornado!

here we are in the weather lab and of course we're very very proud of this facility and this is something we're just launching today we are going to show you the anatomy of a tornado okay and think about this we have all sorts of different sizes of tornadoes right you go from the funnel clouds and the weak tornadoes that you guys just showed to the f5 that hit Moore Oklahoma on this date back in 2013 horrible day alright let's talk about the anatomy of a tornado it starts with a supercell a rotating thunderstorm but on these tornadoes there is one thing that clearly stands out especially when we look at radar it is called the hook echo and that hook echo is a little appendage on the southern flank of the storm we know that these storms aren't flat they are in the vertical 40 50 60 thousand feet so let's pull this thing up and look at it because when you look at this big rotating thunderstorm and as massive as it is look at what's going on down here that tornado so just a small part but the most violent part of that supercell is right there in that tornado so let's lift the base of this and talk a little bit about tornado Genesis because a lot of the research over the past several years has gone into what actually kicks off the tornado from the supercell well there's one thing that stands out you can sometimes see this when you're in the field it is called the rear flank downdraft that's when the upper-level winds get caught the downdraft they come through the back side and if that rear flank downdraft isn't super cold it can actually allow a tornado form especially when you have on the eastern side of that warm moist air so warm moist air cool out flow on the back side of that you see the rotation going on and voila we've got ourselves a tornado proceeding a tornado there's another feature we have to talk about and you saw it on the video that we just showed it's a wall cloud it's the base of the thunderstorm beginning to lower tremendous violent motion sometimes these whole wall clouds are rotating sometimes you just see the air coming up into the wall cloud but when the wall cloud starts to produce a funnel and whether that funnel is on the ground or not as a tornado the problem is is when you see debris on the ground you know you've got a tornado and the debris cloud is the last place you want to be because within that you've got trees you've got homes you've got cars and sometimes you have humans and that debris of course is being rotated around the storm and effect is eventually centrifuged out in some of the stronger tornadoes we see common features right that immediate funnel and that is upward motion right on the outside of that tornado followed by inward motion sinking motion on the inside this is an amazing feat of nature and no country in the world has more tornadoes than the United States we average 1,300 per year Sam Jen and aratus that's more than ten times any other country in the world

Channel: The Weather Channel

Views: 445,443

Keywords: The Weather Channel (TV Network), Sam Champion (Celebrity), Jim Cantore (Organization Member), Tornado (Disaster Type), Weather (TV Genre), storms, severe, AMHQ, Augmented Reality (Media Genre)

Id: mclPB06sCYY

Length: 2min 36sec (156 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2015