Tornadoes spawn from cloud to ground, right? Probably not, says this new study.
Source: Washington Post
Tornadoes spawn from cloud to ground, right? Probably not, says this new study.
By Ian Livingston and
Jason Samenow December 13 at 4:47 PM
New research could help reshape how we think tornadoes form.
The study, presented Thursday at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in Washington, expands on previously published work that investigated the massive El Reno tornado in 2013. It had winds up to 300 mph, and was the widest tornado ever observed. It killed several storm chasers. And it is one of the most-studied tornadoes of the past five years.
When Jana Houser and her colleagues looked back at the data, they noticed something they hadn’t observed before — instead of starting in the clouds and dropping to the ground, the tornadoes they examined appeared to have started at the ground and worked their way up. The 2013 El Reno tornado was among these. In all, they found five cases in which their radars detected that signature. It’s a small sample size, but it could prove invaluable to the severe-weather research community.
The idea that tornadoes form, or at least appear to form, from the ground up is not a new theory. What’s significant, according to scientists not involved in the study, is that this could be the start of a database that could be used to prove one of several hypotheses on tornado formation.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2018/12/13/tornadoes-spawn-cloud-ground-right-probably-not-says-this-new-study/
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Source: A54H-25: Rapid-Scan Mobile Radar Observations of Tornadogenesis (American Geophysical Union)
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