Back when I was twelve and life was just a giant letter "Q" hanging in the sky, my eyes landed on my first diagram of a supercell in National Geographic. June 1986 with the Patowmack Canal, and I completely wore the rag out. With a mind tuned for Meaning in a society tuned for Relevance, it took me years of searching to find answers about my weather on the Gulf Coast. I became old enough to take time-lapses with the World's first digital cameras...and I noticed that the updrafts would often *accelerate* upwards, and I'd bliss out being completely mesmerized, and appreciative, and lost, and small. Grasping basic thermodynamics was hard as a teenager and it took years to form intuitions, and even more years to finally connect General Thermodynamics with things like atmosphere-scale Latent Heat of Condensation : ) Nowadays I design and operate giant tesla coils for a living, am a roadie, pilot, scuba diver, and storm chaser of course. Mr. Orf's videos have brought me to tears multiple times...I am in awe of such deep application of computation, and how visually and tangibly he and his peers demonstrate the emergence of extreme complexity from extreme simplicity. In the span of 30 years, the World went from super basic "airflow diagrams", to Orf's purely emergent high-resolution video storm structures - and I got to watch the whole thing. You, reader, and I, are so very fortunate to be connected to scientists like this, and at this point in my writing I'm overwhelmed with the desire to apologize on behalf of my society. The scientific elite ought to be highly, highly revered. Look how the man speaks; he aint doing this for the money! Like all true scientists, he does it because he loves it and he knows it's good for his fellow creatures.
Man the Gulf Coast was a great place for a kid who liked weather to grow up, wasn't it? I don't miss the heat, I don't miss the mosquitos but I sure miss that great big theatre in the sky!
@@heeroyuy298 Yes absolutely!! All those high-energy pulse storms!! Pretty hard if you wanted to see a tornado though... I always felt like the Universe denied me of them. Bucketlist item for me is to live in central Oklahoma for a tornado-season or two.
Thank you so much for sharing this! I'm a layman who's always been interested in tornadoes and while most of the technical lingo went over my head, the whole concept is absolutely fascinating and your enthusiasm is contagious!
I’m 64 years old and wish I was 18 again! I didn’t understand many of the terms but the simulations are fascinating and I would love to be inside your head! I have followed a full time storm chaser from here in WI for over 2 yrs (Vince Waelti) and have learned much from him and others. (Reed Timmer, Pacos Hank, Daniel Shaw). Thank you and go WI and go Badgers!
Leigh, I commented once before in another video of yours. I'm quite an experienced software developer among other things and that is most impressive. It's always more difficult when you begin before the framework and modeling engines are developed/widely implemented. You've built quite the name for yourself, keep it up!
29:35 Exactly. Tornadoes vary like snowflakes do. Well, not quite. But anyway, I believe it was the Jarrell beast that began life as a spinning little drillbit (beautifully documented on youtube) before transforming very quickly into a big fat multi vortex slow moving grinding chewing sand blasting livestock people and houses blender. That Jarrell twister must have been the stuff of nightmares. What a force of nature.
That video of that storm during its early stage by the camera crew... is just mind melting. A drillbit dangling from a bunch of haze, later morphing into a wide multiple vortex EF5 that decided to sit and spin in one place for like 5 minutes. Perhaps, someday, I will be able to replicate that sort of thing but we'll never know the exact conditions that produced it. I am thinking in these super top end cases there are fortuitous blobs of air in the boundary layer from, say, previous old storms, that get ingested by the updraft that cause it to go crazy. Just a.... 'theory' in the colloquial sense. It would be pretty straightforward to introduce that kind of thing into a "normal" simulation and see what happens. Same for Pilger, and El Reno 2013, I imagine.
@@LeighOrfsThunderstormResearch I'm in the UK so I don't get the opportunity to chase, really. Everything i have learned from watching endless footage and Skip Talbots education vids. That footage of the baby Jarrell twister...camera pans up to the heavens and there appears to be nothing there...just grey mist. Watching the El Reno tornado form up is just about the most mesmerising thing I've ever seen. Tuscaloosa is just unreal. That bloody thing was having a party, throwing horizontal vortices all over the place and the sound it made, rucking the place up, just a huge epic noise like the boiling surface of the sun. I'm fascinated by the noise, each tornado seems to have its own signature music. The Joplin sounded like Niagara Falls. The latter day Moore, and the one that hit Clem Schultz House (Fairdale?) ...is a unique hum at a certain fixed frequency which I struggle to compare with anything (one hundred factory air conditioning units?) Good luck with your research! Are you by any chance the researcher collaborating with Pecos Hank? Seems an intelligent friendly fun guy to work with....
So happy to know this kindof work is making progress. I've only just found your channel. RU-vid loves to show me the intense chase videos; I think its catching onto that I like to see where the science is at.
Wow. I have no knowledge or background in this field, but your passion and the way you present this information is so engaging and understandable. Can't wait to see whats next!
Incredible work. I'd seen your video with Hank a few years back and was curious what your later simulations looked like... Hope you get all the supercomputer time you need!
I took a good look at the simulations, some thinkingand other videos of tornadoes and I can't help but say that there might be a some way to tell if a tornado could strike. Although that supercells even non tornadic ones have vorticity, but the vorticity wasn't completely substantial. This might actually have to do something how the rear flank gust front billows outward into a pair of vorticies that the one gets rejected and one that is incorperated and channels the airflow from the svc and the warm sector inward and at a unidirection tangental angle of rotation that then unifies directly and seemlessly within the mesocyclone. I feel like it was something I could suggest in tornado prediction, although i haven't compared with supercells without tornadoes with supercells that do, so if you have the chance to show one that doesn't make a tornado versus one that makes one.
Love your work Dr. Orf! I'm not sure if you could It would be cool if you shared a single frame of data with a tornado ongoing so people at home could tinker with visualizations for stuff thats not like 200 meter resolution
Nope, I'm looking at supercell tornadoes exclusively right now, using a cloud model. I do see landspouts occasionally in my simulations, within the supercell itself (usually along the forward or rear flanks). You will see wind engineers with models that just spin up tornado like vortices with a fake updraft, and those can be tweaked to form different types of tornadoes (but they're not connected to a storm, so they are somewhat suspect in some ways!).
I think that in parts of the world where tornadoes are so prevalent there needs to be a new way of building homes. For example: stop making the roof a separate structure. The way they’re built now with the trusses sitting on top of the main structure it’s ripe for being pulled off. I’m no engineer so what I’m saying might be really basic but I think you’ll still get the point I’m trying to make. Why can’t they design a home where the roof and the main structure are one solid piece so the wind and pressure can’t get between the main structure and the roof, lifting it off? The way the roof is now it acts like a big sail once it’s been breached. We have building codes where I live for earthquake proofing, to make the structures as solid as possibly in the event of an earthquake. Yet the building practices in Tornado Alley haven’t changed at all. Of course this is JMO and it’s based on no real science, just observation and the want to create a safer place for people trying to survive such a devastating natural event.
From your lips to our government's ears. I agree 100% ... there are some cheap engineering practices that can help quite a bit. However it's a pretty complex issue when you toss socioeconomics into the mix. Can we design manufactured homes that can, say, sustain EF2 winds? Hopefully we'll make progress in this area soon.
May help for weaker tornados, but if you're hit by an ef4-5 the pressure pull on the roof isn't going to matter much when your house is being hit by 200mph debris, it's gunna grind your house up regardless. If you have the money you can get your house built with whatever modifications you want
@@LeighOrfsThunderstormResearch highly recommend looking at some of my videos on my channel and seeing how similar my tornado simulator is compared to yours. I have made multi vortex, vortex breakdowns, and many other things like suction spots. One weird thing I noticed is that sometimes my simulator might produce a drill bit tornado but I might try it another day and it produces a multi vortex.
i would love to talk with this man about the nitty gritty software implementation details. I cant imagine what kind of code hijinx and re-purposing he has had to perform while working on this stuff.
@@LeighOrfsThunderstormResearch Fair enough. Could largely be attributed mesoscale factors contributing to the supercells evolution (as you've suggested) If not, may also try to find a modeled sounding with RM that matches the vector of the 18 mile tornado. and/or a sounding where such a vector can be placed on BRM/Upshear axis.
@@aaronpeters6209 Yep. It's clear there were mesoscale boundaries present that were critical for this weird storm and thus far I have yet to introduce them into my simulations. It's relatively straightforward to do (in an ideal sense) but that's a whole new study in and of itself.
