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Music

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Tim Samaras: Since I was a kid, I've always been interested in storms. As an

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engineer I try to understand how things work. So, I actually

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built and designed a device to measure the weather, basically,

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on the inside of a tornado.

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The United States on average gets about 

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1200 tornadoes per year. And the reason is, is because of its unique

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geographic location. You got the Gulf of Mexico off

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to the South, and theses storm systems as they pass through draw

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this Golf moisture as water vapor and comes right up through the Midwest. And

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spring time generally reflects a very, what we call a very active jet stream 

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and it brings us a very powerful winds that

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just comes right across the Midwest. That combination allows

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these big storm systems to develop and of course wind shear is a very powerful ingredient

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for a tornado. The ingredients for a tornado

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obviously are quite complex but some of the basics are, 

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you have to have moisture, you have to have lift and then the

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other most important ingredient is what they call wind shear. And

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shear creates these big horizontal rolls in the atmosphere.

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And then when a thunderstorm forms underneath it, it actually tips these

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horizontal rolls in a vertical position to where a thunderstorm forms

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over them, you have the whole thunderstorm rotating. Those final

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processes are what we're trying to study.

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What's bringing the rotation finally all the way to the ground and that's

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really one of the biggest mysteries of tornado formation.

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You know its very difficult to forecast where a tornadoes going to be. When we're actually in 

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the field, waiting for thunderstorms to develop, we use what they call visible

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satellite imagery. This is basically a picture from space, showing

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the best areas, what we call instability, and that's how and where 

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we are able to target these storms that are developing.

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Ground-based radar can't even see these storms develop, but satellite can.

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Satellites also detect what we call boundaries.

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These boundaries, left over from old thunderstorms, become the

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focus of new thunderstorms during the day and actually enhance

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the tornado potential. Visible satellite technology allows us to

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identify this, which otherwise would be going totally 

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unnoticed and undetected. One of the biggest 

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things that I would love to see in future satellite technology is the

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ability to actually see lightning within the cloud tops. All the 

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vertical motion and so forth greatly enhances the ability to create lightening.

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This lightning mapping will actually show frequency. If the storm is 

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becoming severe, the lightning frequency increases and thus being

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able to do an early detection of whether or not that storm is severe or not.

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Music

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If we knew more 

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about tornado genesis and structure and we're able to stretch that warning out to twenty or

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twenty five minutes, right now the average time is about fifteen minutes or so,

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that gives people more time to prepare and seek shelter.

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Without the GOES satellite we would be back in the dark ages of the mid to early

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sixties. These GOES satellites are responsible, in my opinion, for saving 

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many many thousands of lives.

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