Transcript:

ambience: Tornado winds

We’re listening to one of the most fearsome sounds in the natural world a tornado. In the United States alone, roughly fifty people a year are killed by these powerful storms. Hoping to find a way to more accurately predict them, scientists have been studying the tornado’s characteristics. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

“What we’ve learned so far is that tornadoes form within the thunderstorm, perhaps in ways that we never really thought of.”

Harold Brooks is a meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory. He’s part of a team of researchers who’ve been following tornadoes in order to collect detailed information about how they start.

“We’ve seen, particularly that last stage of getting a very intensive vortex at the ground, there may be things that go on in those final minutes before a tornado is formed that may be very difficult for us ever to be able to forecast very well. We’ve found that there are small scale discontinuities in the atmosphere where the wind may shift slightly, or there may be a small scale front that we haven’t been able to previously observe because we just don’t collect enough observations at enough places for us to see them.”

“It’s likely that the research that we do will help in the forecasting of tornadoes, but then secondarily will help in the forecasting of other kinds of events - because based on the climatological studies that have been done in the past, maybe only as few as ten to thirty percent of the storms that are rotating, that can be observed by a fixed radar, are actually going to produce tornadoes at the ground.”

The tornado recording we have been listening to and other sounds featured on our series can be found on the Pulse of the Planet CD Book, published by the Nature Company.

Pulse of the Planet is presented by the National Science Foundation.