The Incredible Force Of Wind | Richard Hammond's Wild Weather | Spark

whether one of the most astonishing forces on earth capable of both devastating power and spectacular beauty wherever you live on the planet whether shapes your world yet for most of us how it works is a mystery to really understand whether you have to get inside it so I'm going to strip weather back to basics all the science uncovering its secrets in a series of brave ambitious and sometimes just plain unlikely experiments to show you whether like you've never seen it before there is a powerful invisible force that moves around us almost unnoticed a force that drives almost all the extreme weather on a planet that force is wind in this program I'll discover how wind creates that extreme weather what it's capable and just how fast it can go along the way I'll attempt to measure the speed of a tornado right next to the ground I'll create a whirlwind made of fire to discover how a win becomes a spinning ring and I'll become one of the few people in history to deliberately walk into the middle of a twister this is said to be the place with the worst weather in the world a place so forbidding that only the fearless or the foolhardy would want to experience it [Music] so has it it guess where we're starting this is Mount Washington in the unlikely location of New Hampshire USA you wouldn't expect extreme weather to be found in New England but on April 12th 1934 Matt Washington weather station measured one of the fastest wind speed ever recorded all 231 miles an hour [Music] in fact winds here hit hurricane force more than a hundred days ago now bear that in mind during the next couple of minutes because I'm about to take a little walk outside okay just something out which is it turns out quite a chore out here I can not only hear the wind I can feel it the whole place is vibrating oh no this is this is the divot of my water and just right your eyeballs can freeze any exposed skin you have frostbite on it within two or three minutes right that's my best half I won't get cold with that on this is to stop my nose falling off which would be bad because I'd never be able to wear sunglasses again liner gloves obviously I am now obliged by law to say I'm going outside I might be some time at this point I think I should try and give you some idea of what I might be in with a small demonstration the lightest wind you can feel on your face is about five miles an hour enough to rustle this newspaper 15 miles an hour and your umbrella and keeps up the ghost 25 miles-an-hour can cause a deckchair to set sail followed at 30 miles an hour by a garden furniture 45 and all health stars to Breakers seemingly rigid structures suddenly make a break for it and at 55 miles an hour even small buildings are on so why am I telling you all this because on man Washington it's currently 65 with gusts reaching a staggering 85 miles an hour believe it or not I'm actually sheltered at the moment there's hardly any wind right here because I'm in the Lee of the building it starts about six feet that way and then there's a lot of it and the only way to demonstrate those are gonna go and stand in it and for reasons best known to themselves Brandon and Sean on camera and said that the sun's come with me because they're idiots so um he'll go right walking not with me not with me this is a 65 baby 70 miles an hour the width but don't declare this is the site of one of the homeless wheel speeds ever recorded by mine how's that feel I'd begun calculation around these parts where you take your weight in pounds what about hundred and fifty hundred and sixty have it that's the wind speed in which you're going to get into trouble which is about this wind speed there are three major storm systems at me Rahul so the long-distance weather patterns a corner behind me is the most exposed place which should make that the windiest spot on this pole mountain but lots of places have storm systems why is it here that's so windy don't worry about this they said it was just a precaution so take my hat the one that caused this in the first place let's pretend this is man Washington this desk fan is the wind and we can see the wind hitting the top of the mountain man Washington is the highest thing for miles around so although there are Hills here and here and a town here ski resort there they make the difference to the wind hitting Mount Washington they're not high enough as obstacles to block it or disrupt its flow so any wind there is will hit the top of the mountain but there is another reason why it's so windy up there and it's complicated enough to demand a clipboard all of our weather happens in the troposphere the first 11 miles or so of our atmosphere and the top of that layer acts as a sort of ceiling you know what it's like when you squeeze the end of a garden hose and the water comes out more powerfully more quickly because it's squeezed through a narrower gap it's exactly the same here there's this it's a precaution the wind is forced through the gap between the top of the mountain and the top of the troposphere that's a narrower gap so it speeds up and that's why it always tends to be windy at the top of a hill so wind is just air rushing from one place to another speeding up as he goes through narrow gaps slowing down as it hits obstacles there are winds near the ground that blow locally and once high in the air that can blow long distances and that is information you can use to your advantage right here's how to amaze your friends first stand with the wind at your back then you're looking for clouds if those clouds are moving overhead directly away from it or directly towards you or they're stationary then the weather is going to stay broadly the same if they're moving from left to right it's gonna get worse if they're moving from right to left it's going to improve so right to left better left to right worse straight down the middle stays the same as long as you have your back to the wind unless you're in the southern hemisphere in which case you reverse that bit brilliant isn't it really clever I mean it's not a hundred percent foolproof because weather is really complicated but it works more often than not and that's about as much as you can save any form of weather forecasting and the clouds must have been traveling right to left upon man Washington because the next morning is truly spectacular [Music] unusually for this time of year the cloud lifts and the wind subsides slightly [Music] and I venture back outside into a suddenly magical landscape folks around here quite proudly proclaim that it has the worst weather in the world and well I don't know I'm going to severe yes but looking at it like this worst not so sure but there's no doubt that this is a place shaped by wind it's so windy here that the buildings have to be chained down even the ice appears to fly off in frozen streamers these streamers don't point away from the wind they grow towards it and here's how ice crystals are carried through the air by the wind but the moment they touch an object they freeze tight the next ice crystal to be blown in freezes to the first gradually building outwards in the direction they blew in from and that gives me an idea I thought of another way you can see wind I looked around a lot of the snow but I can see yeah isn't falling it's been below by the wind sticking to any available surface so but a pocket full of this biodegradable confetti let's wait for a good gust [Music] watch how the confetti blows in swirling patterns you'd think that at these wind speeds everything would just get whisked away in a perfectly straight line but it doesn't it rolls and curls like waves crashing onto a beach and occasionally those rolling eddies turn into tightly knit spirals and ashaming scientists call a vortex it's a shape that's crucial to our story because almost all the weather we think of as extreme is based around them this isn't just about strong winds it's about the other types of weather that wind can produce dust devils water spills tornadoes all the spinny wins based on this vortex path even hurricanes and cyclones have the same spiral shape [Music] but to see how those spirals come about I'm going to examine perhaps the most unusual vortex of the moon [Music] it's called a fire and because they're made entirely of flames it's easier to see the twisting structure [Music] right here is where I'm most likely to find one [Music] the tinder drive forests of Western Australia the vegetation here is so flammable that any stray match or lightning strike can have it ablaze in seconds there are 50,000 bushfires a year in Australia and almost any one of them is capable of creating a firewall but because the fires are so impenetrable and because fire whirls tend to be so short lived it's very rare to actually see one which is why the best way to examine a fire whirl is to build one but I'm not gonna set about building a fire whirl on my own which is why I brought two of the world's leading authorities on fire world's over from Japan to health doctor Kazunori Kawana and engineer kozo second moto have spent many years looking at how and why fire world's spent and they've agreed to lend us a hand to try and start our very own fire world but I'm just discovered this is the first time they've built a full-scale one which is a worry especially when I see them messing about with baking tins of course we have the fire authorities on hand but at the moment they look like they're just there to help with the washing up time to find out what's going on chaps baking tins I'm intrigued how does it work we are trying to create a fire whirl on top of the baking pans we put heptane a combustible liquid in the pans is that what that is well this is water you know that doesn't burn down your toilet all right we put a take on that one that water layer yeah okay why they arranged in this L configuration if the fire the shape of fire is entirely symmetric the swirling motion wouldn't occur so we need some kind of trigger to create a swirling motion this shape this asymmetry somehow triggers something that we're going to see is that good will it ultimately get rid of these flies I thought you were beekeepers when I arrived its unimaginably unpleasant but this isn't merely an extreme type of pest control we're going to see if these 30 baking tins can help us create a spinning vortex and we're not just gonna be looking for this vortex effect here we're also going to be looking from up there we need a bird's-eye view if we're going to reveal what makes a wind spin and this remote-controlled copter is the perfect way to get it that is why I've brought that guy that guy is the drones pilot hi trap a man with 25 years experience of flying remote cameras I pop over to brief him on what we're after right so if we get a firewall going out there this spinning vortex I need a shot directly over the top of it as it forms are you there looking down we'll get the circle just there like that right so you want me to fly over all tornado it's breathing fire you've used very emotive language there I mean it essentially yes yes I mean where yes yeah I think when I have problems here with all the wind and the heat that's coming off the fire I think carbon fibers pretty durable but the the propellers are plastic so don't brain melt off at some stage so how will you know if that starts happening to warn you because presumably I mean if you get closer and you hit the wind it'll you'll see it go all jiggling you can go higher those things are stabilized so the first thing we'll see is the copter heading towards the fire so the stabilizer will cancel out any effects over heat until it melt yes turn a stabilizer well go in raw yeah okay tell your friends Oh stabilized what I threw it into the fiery tornado thing I mean we talked about 100 and what 60 kilometer wings yeah no I tried to explain to high why fire is important to this whole story because heat can create winds let me demonstrate with this cooker now imagine the Hawks represent the earth being heated up by the Sun hot air rises off the hob just as it does from the hot ground making the air above the flames less dense therefore lower pressure but the cold air around the oven is still at normal pressure so it rushes in to fill the gap turning these children's windmills and we can prove that the air is rushing towards the flames with the smoke from this match [Music] higher pressure air rushing towards lower pressure air that is the basis of wind using flames only accentuates the effect which is why a massive fire is the best way to create our own extreme wind but it still doesn't tell us how that extreme wind can start spinning that is why we need the drone so here's the plan first we get a flammable liquid called heptane and fill the pans with it once they're all full we'll set light to them if Kazu and kozo are right there l-shape arrangement will spontaneously trigger a fire whirl next we'll introduce some colored smoke to see if our eye in the sky can capture the wind patterns at work right let's give it a go time to stand well back [Music] at first it all seems a bit underwhelming it looks well it looks like thirty baking tins on fire but as cold air rushes in it feeds the flavors and then quite suddenly they begin to spin the speed seems to intensify the fire even more the flames grow higher and higher until they tower above us its massive a real-life fire world and it seems that hai is prepared to give it a go after all mommy 20 order that if he can get close enough then we've a chance of seeing how a firewall actually works the turbulence up there yeah Roger that remember they have no way of seeing that turbulence gonna be close to fire Sam he won't know he's in trouble until the controls stop responding and the copter literally melts out of the air [Music] [Music] that's looking great night okay so now for the tricky bit trying to see how our fire whirlwind was formed just like we did with the cooker we're going to introduce some smoke the crosswind is so strong that the smoke stays close to the ground and on the far side it glows in a pretty straight line but on this side parts of it Bend round the L shape and get sucked in towards it let me try and explain what's happening here here's L when the wind comes from this direction it rolls around the end of it here and it's drawn towards this fire but it's also drawn towards this one here and that sets it spinning that starts our vortex the vortex rolls along the long arm of the L and when it gets to the fire here it intensifies and this is where our fire world the cold air carrying the smoke on the inside of the L is being caught in two directions at once and it's that that creates those little spinning swirls of green smoke [Music] and ultimately the fire whirl our team managed to successfully capture on camera [Music] now obviously you don't generally find baking pans in the wild but natural elves occur when two separate fire fronts meet each creating their own opposing wings and that's also pretty much how other types of spinning weather start two or more wins meeting at different angles and speeds some rising warm air and cold air rushing in to fill the gap just those simple ingredients can produce some of the most extreme forms of weather we have including the most powerful and deadly wind of them all the tornado because a tornado is spinning it can move far faster than a normal wind not in a straight line but in the speed that they can spin and it's that spin that does the damage look at it this way if I'm spinning this bucket around my head it's not how fast I'm walking towards you that dictates how hard it will hit you when I get there even if I walk really quickly that speeds irrelevant it's how fast I'm spinning the bucket that matters and what's in it to add to the weight and that's how it is with a tornado debris does most of the damage that's the weight in the bucket the most destructive force in the tornado itself is its spin it's rotational speed which is why it's remarkable that's the part of a tornado we know the least about I'd like to find out why and who better to ask than the center for severe weather research in Boulder Colorado I make an appointment with its president Josh Wurman to ask him why that spin speed is still such a mystery scientists have gotten very good at measuring the winds above the ground in the tornado maybe from 50 meters above the ground up to a couple kilometers but the strongest winds in the tornado are below that we think the strongest winds in the tornado might even be below 10 meters using remote sensing with radars we can get up close we can scan back and forth but unfortunately objects block us there's debris pieces of houses cows whatever flying around in the tornado and that's the one place where we are the most blind why isn't it just a machine that you can point at the tornado and measure how many it is moving past what kind is measuring there are two main challenges with in situ measurements the first is how to get something inside the tornado the tornado is moving down the fields and we don't know exactly how it's going it's an unpredictable path so getting something in front is very very hard challenge number two is what happens when we succeed and that is the tornado runs over the object and destroys it so unfortunately the place that we most need to know about is the place that's hardest for us to see if we can understand that better than and engineers will be able to build better buildings will be able to have better shelters and fewer people will get injured and die in tornadoes but how would you begin to measure the speed of a tornado right next to the ground to try and find data we must travel another 1,300 miles to the distinctly untoward nado like landscape of London Ontario and one remarkable building [Music] a person wouldn't normally do I'm coming in all I can say yes as amazing as a suspected looks Oh [Music] a hundred times bigger Oh five times faster but nevertheless this terrifying power of one of these things in the world [Music] I've got goosebumps and look just cause it's cold in it [Music] this is the wind engineering Energy and Environment Research Institute or windy for short and it's the only place on the planet capable of duplicating the real-life dynamics of a tornado [Music] it does it by using 106 giant fans hidden behind the walls and ceiling of the world's first hexagonal winter the whole structure cost 23 million dollars and it isn't even officially open yet we're pretty much the first visitors to set foot inside which makes it all the more delicate asking its boss professor Horry a hangin for a little favor just while we're here in this facility I'd really like to just have a little look at velocities sort of battle in tornadoes can we ever I'm gonna say it's experiment with it do you mind if we make a bit of a mess not a massive mess there might be we'll sweep up won't know we've been here everything will be gone that's fine we can do a little bit of a mess here so we we are prepared to catch some stuff that you'll throw into it so might happen thank you you're welcome good for him he's trusting us with his 23 million-dollar baby right plan they really have let me play sorry experiment with this incredible installation and I want to look more into velocity see how fast the wind is moving and if I introduce these ping-pong balls into a tornado I can measure the speed I'm going to feed them to it [Music] we think of tornadoes are sucking up everything in their path turns out it's not that easy [Music] I retreat to the control room where the professor and I spend the next four hours trying to get something anything to actually fly inside the tornado with no luck and then I think of the confetti on that Washington what we need is something flat and light we find these pink foam squares they're similar to the confetti but because they're substantially bigger it should be easier to track their progress if we can get those foam squares trapped in the tornado and if we can get them lifted up and spun round without being spat out then we might be able to time how long it takes one to do a full lap that is a lot of ifs I know but fingers crossed we're gonna start the fans [Music] [Music] see there it is good yeah yeah that's fantastic there it is it's exactly what we wanted so there he'll there [Music] okay now we've got the foam square circling successfully it's time to turn on the tracking technology [Music] the computer follows individual squares one after another so it can create an average speed from the different trajectories and it works according to the computer it's spinning at a shade over 22 miles an hour the first time one has ever been measured this near the ground [Music] now obviously a real tornado is about a hundred times bigger and much much faster but now we know we can fly things in a fake tornado it stands to reason we can get them to fly inside a real one problem is how we're gonna get them in there I'm not standing next to it with the bucket I have tried some things [Music] none of them really worked I need help with this so I've made contact with a scientist who says he might have a solution he's asked me to meet him here in well as it turns out the middle of nowhere [Music] [Music] [Music] this bizarre vehicle is the Dominator 3 a hand-built tornado-proof armored car and as meteorologist reed timmer explains it's one of a kind there's no other vehicle like this is just one big meteorologist to instrument it's like a mobile tornado Pro does he have a beam in the basic until native this has this is the Dominator 3s this is brand-new last year and we intercepted three or four tornadoes to dominate geez woman 2 no they're still they're still on the ground thankfully what I want to know is what are the chances of using the Dominator to measure the speed of a tornado near the ground you're the base of the tornado is one of the biggest mysteries of tornado science and it's also the most important to understand because it's those wind speeds that directly impact the structures and and caused the the destruction that we see with tornadoes every spring and summer that's why we built this vehicle is to get up close if not inside those and unravel those mysteries so if you could get this into a tornado you couldn't deploy something into it but allow you physically to measure the rotational wind speed it is roughly what I was doing the endurance officials who made it was just with the real it is presumably then quite incredibly dangerous yeah there is a level of risk involved but as a storm chaser all I've done since I was 18 years old as get close to tornadoes which really begs just one question he was scientist and adrenaline junkie or a lunatic probably all debulk read sounds like the perfect person for us using the Dominator he can get really close to a tornado and he's already thought about how he could fire a data recording probe right into it so I wanted to stop right here yeah because just south of our position right down there was a f5 tornado back in 1999 and they recorded the strongest wind speeds ever record on the planet over 300 miles an hour right down here just to ourselves in less than 21 hours 74 tornadoes touched down in the states of Oklahoma and Kansas the most prolific outbreak in history but the most destructive of them all was right here in the sixty minutes or so of its existence it's phenomenal spin speed caused more than a billion dollars worth of damage scientists measured the winds inside it at 300 miles an hour but those speeds don't tell the whole story those winds were measured higher up above the ground and who knows how strong those wind speeds were right near their surface for the strongest tornado in history and that came through right where we are yeah so if this were a real situation what do you say hot live whatever if it were coming towards us and you're here with this weapons net well well look to the southwest and it's not moving side to side it off it's likely coming right at us so I'll line up that left edge and make sure we're in the path that will drop the vehicle flush to the ground show you here really quick and we're inside a foot but yeah that'll be a good idea okay that's supposed to happen and then the spikes also go into the ground and then there's the probe right there and the parachute will pop up when it's that peak flight just 50 feet up and it gets sucked into the tornado so if everything's worked perfectly that probe will have gone out of there and ended up in the tornado spinning around and getting that critical rotational speed yeah the tornado will pick it up there's updrafts to the funnel as well it'll pick up the parachute it'll spiral around inside measuring temperature moisture and pressure to rate of 5 times a second and all of that will happen it's going to one of these years okay good luck [Music] so there we have it the Dominator is going to take the place of our woman with the bucket and it's compressed air powered Ruth cannon does the job my catapult and paintball gun couldn't and now all they need to do is find a real-life tornado and park next to it [Music] obviously that could take a very long time so Reid and his team are on their own from now on no film crew with them just them and the Dominator and a very ambitious mission it actually takes six weeks but finally Reid and his crew a hot on the heels of a real-life twister the trick now is to get as close as they dare close enough to fire a probe straight into its heart but finding that heart turns out to be pretty a tornado can travel at about 70 miles an hour across the ground and change direction frequently and without warning which makes getting ahead of one incredibly difficult and they need to get to him quick the lifespan of the average twister is just five to ten short minutes [Music] see tornado on the ground right there sweetie oh it is huge about a hundred meters across and at least a kilometer tall [Music] oh my god the tornado is coming straight for them [Music] it's perfect [Music] not the best time for the dominators window to fail [Music] it's in they got the probe inside I thought make one full revolution that I lost visual on it so I know at least went around one time but that's only half the challenge now they need to retrieve it to find out what it recorded they wait for the storm to pass then set off out through the trail of devastation in search of the probe out three miles out for some reason they're not picking up its GPS signal so they're reduced to searching on foot over the road that way spun around like this all the way around and if you send it either behind these trees or these trees right here so within a couple hundred feet of up against all the odds they spotted but the probe is damaged it's trip around the twister has torn away their housing leaving the electronics exposed so were they successful the moment I get word I'm straight on to read to find out hi read I got the thing into a tornado yes was that a special moment very scary moment - honestly I think I might be getting a little too old for these tornado steps but our ears were popping from the pressure fall it's a pretty intense tornado and seeing the probe take off what's definite amazing feeling so you've got it you've got the probe the information is stored on it and what we want to know is the speed at the Bazin at the different heights in the tornado that data is possibly on the probe won't be able to get it off here should be any week any day now and we've got so close I mean yeah there it is okay [Music] Reid and his team have accomplished something that no one has ever done before they've managed to get a flying probe into the base of a tornado today is the first time we've recovered one that we knows inside it's for data so this is a huge success for our science mission that's it it's definitely a stepping stone for things to come in the future it's a proud moment unfortunately the probe turned out to be too badly damaged so they're planning on doing it all over again we've discovered what winds are and how they begin how their paths can be used to predict the weather we've seen the way a wind can start to spin and how spinning winds are the basis for much of our extreme weather [Music] more than anything we're one step closer to revealing one of weathers greatest mysteries how fast a tornado can spin but for the moment the actual answer is still a weather secret [Music]

Channel: Spark

Views: 723,323

Rating: 4.8559394 out of 5

Keywords: Spark, Science, Technology, Engineering, science documentary, science photography, science explained, science experiment

Id: LO5vcaujZEI

Length: 56min 42sec (3402 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2020