Storm Chaser Answers Severe Weather Questions From Twitter

I'm meteorologist, storm chaser and author, Cyrena Arnold.

We're here to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Severe Weather Support.

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@Barbsloco says, where is Tornado Alley?

So Tornado Alley is Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas.

Tornadoes occur in these locations April, May, June.

Now we're seeing a little bit of a shift

where tornado Alley is moving further east as well

because we have moisture from the Gulf that comes up.

You also have cold, dry air come further down

and that warm air and cold air coming together

is what helps to cause thunderstorms.

And the reason that we are seeing this Eastern migration

of tornado alley is mostly because of climate change.

@Olivfrog says,

How the do we predict weather?

How do we just see the future

and know what the temperature is?

So the way we're able to predict the future

and tell you what's gonna be happening

is through weather models, a whole bunch of equations

that are thrown into a computer,

they are run at government institutions

or universities and research facilities.

They're taking in what's happening

with the atmosphere right now.

They're applying it to these equations

that we know about the atmosphere

and outputting information

about what's gonna be happening in the future.

So then your TV meteorologist can log onto their computer,

pull up these different websites

and actually see what's happening in those forecast models.

Even the free weather app on your phone

is usually being tied back

to one specific forecast weather model.

We as meteorologists have to be able

to figure out which model are we gonna use

in what situation.

We know different forecast models

have different strengths and weaknesses.

Some are really good within the next 12 to 24 hours.

Some are much better

when we're looking out five to seven days.

Some are better at forecasting hurricanes,

some are better at nor'easters

and some perform differently

in different locations around the world.

Weather forecasting is really hard.

Here we are this big rock in space,

we've covered 70% of the surface with water.

Then we've got this crazy gas around the entire planet.

That's our atmosphere.

We're spinning it a thousand miles an hour

as we're rocketing through the solar system.

The sun is roasting one half

and the other half is facing the vast void

of space and is cooling.

And now you want me to tell you what's gonna be happening

in five days?

@dieujuu asks, Tornadoes always gonna confuse me

because how the F do they happen?

So you're telling me the wind just throws

that ass in a circle?

Scientifically, it's kind of what happens.

This is a super cell thunderstorm.

They rotate counterclockwise

and these are the storms that are capable

of producing tornadoes right here under this rotating part

of the storm that's called a mesocyclone

with all the circulations, the updrafts, the downdrafts,

the rotations in these thunderstorms.

This is actually also a very large updraft area.

You create a void down here

and that creates an area of low pressure

and this is the area that forms a tornado.

So typically about one out

of every 10 storm chases actually results

in seeing a tornado

because they are incredibly hard to forecast.

This storm could be capable

of producing a tornado or maybe not.

Tornadoes can last for just a couple seconds at a time.

Sometimes tornadoes can last for an hour

and go for miles and miles.

Becky Lou says, Why are hailstones thing?

Whose idea was it to hurl tiny blocks

of ice from the sky into our faces?

When you have a strong to severe thunderstorm,

the updrafts in that storm are incredibly strong.

And so it takes these little water drops

and it launches them up really high way above

that freezing line, and they turn to ice.

Then what happens is they fall down back

through the storm again, go back below the freezing line,

and as they're passing through, lots

of water drops are hitting them and they catch the updraft

and there they go up again for another cycle.

And that water freezes and it does this over and over

and over again.

If you find a hailstone

and you're able to cut it open,

most likely it's gonna look like it has rings.

Like if you cut down a tree from all of the trips

in the cycles that made inside of the storm.

So if you're looking at some hailstones

and you find little pea size hailstones

on the ground, that's great.

Your storm wasn't very strong,

but hail sizes can actually exceed baseball size hail,

gorilla hail is just another name

for really large hail grapefruit size

or larger like four inches in diameter or larger.

And on a storm chase I was on earlier in June,

the National Weather Service issued their first ever warning

for DVD sized hailstones.

@Shufflupaguss says,

Wait, Sahara dust affects weather in the USA.

Sahara dust absolutely affects our weather here

in the United States.

The Sahara here in the northern part of Africa

has lots of dirt and sand,

and when we get severe sandstorms,

those blow across here and take the sand

and bring it over this moist, warm ocean.

And we have water that's constantly evaporating

and that water condenses on the sand

and this eventually forms the first clouds

that will eventually turn into hurricanes

and potentially impact the United States.

Ash XX 11 says,

If someone gets caught in a tornado in their car,

do you open a window?

Also do you open windows in your home?

People say it's a myth.

There's absolutely no need to open the window in your car.

It's a common misconception that low pressure

is what breaks the window in a tornado.

It's actually the debris two by fours

and other things like that

that the tornado is throwing around.

If you're indoors in any building of any kind, get as low

to the ground as possible.

You wanna go to an interior room

where you don't have any windows.

The more central to your house

and the more interior with tight walls

around you, the safer you're gonna be.

If you are stuck outside, then what you need to do

is get to the lowest line area you can, even if

that means lying in a ditch in a field somewhere,

never ever park your car under an overpass.

Might seem like a good idea.

You may wanna protect your car from getting any damage,

but what's gonna happen is one, the winds are gonna funnel

through there in a really bad storm,

but two other cars park under there.

You could potentially be keeping emergency services

from reaching people who were just hit by a tornado

and badly need medical attention.

@GMMonster7000 asks, Wait, quick question.

What are some of the latest technological advancements

in tornado prediction?

Have they improved warning times?

Asking for myself.

Yeah, absolutely.

We have a lot of increased radar technology

and better notification.

It has definitely increased tornado warning times.

In the 1980s, we only had about four

or five minutes heads up when there was a tornado warning

before a tornado actually be occurring.

Today, that warning time is up to on average 13 minutes.

And there's some instances even where we are being able

to give tornado warnings

almost a half an hour before a tornado.

The technology that's making

that happen is drastically improved radar data.

So this is a radar image of

what a super cell thunderstorm looks like.

Not only when we are improving

how frequently we're scanning the sky,

but we're also getting more detailed information

back on that storm.

We've gone from them looking in the atmosphere every eight

to 10 minutes down to every four to six minutes,

and in some instances even more frequently than that,

and it's with that increased radar technology that allows us

to get a better picture of that storm.

@Phil_Reed's_News.

So have you been able to recognize patterns

or relations between the radars and frequencies

and the weather?

You know, see a certain radar lidar pattern, then you know

to expect higher low pressure, tornadoes, et cetera?

What's interesting about looking at lidar and radar

and stuff like that is they are tools

to help us understand what's going on

in the atmosphere right now.

This image here shows radar reflectivity,

weather radar is sending out radar beams

and they're bouncing off of the little raindrops

and water drops and coming back.

And what it tells us is in decibels what is happening.

Basically it's showing the intensity of the storm.

These radars are located across the country.

The radar is housed inside of a domed tower.

You see 'em a lot of times at airports

or just outside of major populations.

This image here on the other side shows us a velocity image

and this tells us whether things are moving too

or away from the storm.

And this red green difference we see right here

is called a couplet.

That's telling us all

of this is moving away from the radar except

for this one little piece that's moving towards

what that's indicative of then is rotation

and could mean that there's a tornado there.

This comma here on the right is the hook echo.

This is the mesocyclone.

What you see above this hook is where the rain is

and where the downdraft is.

TheNewsBox1 asks, What is the difference

between a violent tornado and a regular tornado?

Does a violent tornado mug you

after blowing everything over?

Not quite.

So there's different scales of tornadoes.

Weak tornadoes are there's EF0 to EF1 tornadoes.

They typically don't last very long.

The wind speeds are relatively low, sometimes less than

or around a hundred miles an hour,

which were tornadoes actually pretty small.

EF2s and EF3s are strong tornadoes.

And then our violent tornadoes do account for 70%

of all tornado fatalities.

In an EF4 or an EF5 tornado,

wind speeds exceed 200, 300 miles an hour.

The May 3rd, 1999 tornado in Moore, Oklahoma

had a mobile radar unit measure wind speeds

at over 300 miles per hour.

@Schafernaker asks, What are El Nino and La Nina

and how do they change the weather?

What these are are sea surface temperatures

of the Eastern Pacific, somewhere between Central America

and South America, very close to the equator.

We monitor the sea surface temperatures there

because they're either in an El Nino phase,

which means they're a couple degrees warmer

than they should be, or we are in a La Nina phase

and there are a couple degrees below where they should be.

Now these El Ninos

and La Ninas have very large effects on our weather.

So for example, during an El Nino year,

we can see certain parts

of the country be wetter than normal.

Other parts of the country will be warmer

or drier than normal.

The biggest driver that we see with La Nina

and El Nino is how they affect

what happens in the Atlantic Ocean

and how they impact the forecasts for our hurricane seasons.

@Truthscant is asking, Why is AccuWeather predicting

a supercharged hurricane season in 2024?

Do they know something that we don't?

Yeah, actually they do.

So with this upcoming hurricane season,

the Hurricane Center, Colorado State University,

atmospheric G2, all of these locations are forecasting

an above average hurricane season.

First of all, the waters in the oceans right now

and the Atlantic and the Caribbean

are darn near record highs.

Warm water is the fuel for hurricanes.

It's what makes them strong

and it allows them to last for a really long period of time.

The second reason is we spent last summer in 2023

in an El Nino year.

El Nino years are known

for reducing hurricane activity in the Atlantic.

The bad news is that we are transitioning

from an El Nino year to a La Nina year.

It means those sea surface temperatures

in the Eastern Pacific are gonna be colder than average.

When that happens, it actually decreases the amount

of wind shear we see in the Atlantic Ocean

and is also something that leads

to an increased hurricane season.

So hurricane season begins June 1st

and goes all the way through November 30th.

And within that timeframe, in a typical year,

we see about 14 name storms.

About three of those become major hurricane,

which is category three, four or five.

For 2024, the experts are forecasting

that we're gonna see more like 23 named storms.

So the number of named storms we're forecast

to see this year as well as the severity

of them is higher than what we've ever forecast before.

@Starbex asks, Are storm chasers adrenaline junkies,

or are they doing real science out there

with all those crazy gadgets and gizmos

and their storm chasing cars?

All of us are a little bit

of adrenaline junkies at heart can't deny it.

It's something that we do absolutely love.

The toolkit for a storm chaser can vary far and wide.

We definitely all have cameras

we're looking for weather data through redundant sources.

So we're getting warnings on our phones

and alerts are popping up.

We're getting texts.

We can pull up radar data on computers,

but many of us also have weather radios with us

because if you get into an area where there's no internet,

there's no cell phone reception,

they will announce when warnings are issued

and the locations that those warnings are for.

Another thing that a lot of storm chasers

will have with them is different types of anemometers,

a fancy word for something that measures the wind speed.

You're gonna see anemometers like this one

that are both measure the wind speed with the propeller

and the direction of wind.

One of the things that people are most interested in doing

is collecting weather data from inside the tornado.

Sometimes you see people shooting rockets into storms,

flying drones very closely nearby to storms.

There's some research teams where their goal

is to get out in front of the tornado

and put these weather instrumentation dishes

that are really, really heavy out on the ground

or in fields with the purpose

of having a tornado come over them, suck it up.

Kind of like you saw in the movie Twister,

that's actually based on a real scientific experiment

that happened about 30, 40 years ago.

The actual vessel, instead of being named Dorothy,

was actually named Toto.

@Melo_Malebo says,

Weather forecasts always mention

it's gonna be partly sunny or partly cloudy.

What's the difference?

I feel your pain there.

But to help you understand this better,

what we're gonna do is we're gonna imagine the sky

above us is like an upside down bowl, like a big dome.

We are gonna divide it into eight sections.

This is how us meteorologists look at the sky.

If there's no clouds present

and all sections are clear, we're gonna go ahead

and call that clear.

If however, we take one of these sections

and we fill it with clouds.

Now this one section is going to tell us

that this is mostly clear

because now we have one eighth

of the sky that has clouds in it.

If we have two eighths covered, this is now mostly sunny.

Here's the handy dandy cheat sheet

with all of its fractions.

Partly cloudy is three eighths of the sky obscured

by clouds, partly sunny is four eighths,

but if you have all eights of the sky covered in clouds,

it's just a good old fashioned cloudy day.

@KiddChris asks, In the movie Twister,

the EF5 is so strong that it destroyed everything.

Yet the two main characters used leather belts tied

to a pipe to prevent them from blowing away.

I'm starting to think that it was fake.

Yeah, absolutely it was.

So this was supposed to be an EF5 tornado,

the strongest of all tornadoes.

They wouldn't have been able to hang on

with just leather belts.

There would be an incredible amount

of debris flying around in there.

We're talking about entire roofs of houses

and they would unfortunately have been hit

by a lot of that debris.

So in that movie, which is one of my absolute favorites,

don't get me wrong, you see things like cows fly by,

tornadoes are able to pick up cows,

they are able to pick up tanker trucks.

They're just incredibly,

incredibly powerful forces of nature.

So in some ways the movie is accurate in what it shows you

and what the tornado is capable of moving or picking up

or the damage that it causes.

I like Corn wants to know,

How accurate is the science in the new Twisters movie?

Can we actually disrupt tornadoes in real life?

And WTF twin tornadoes can combine into one, like what?

The odds of two tornadoes being able

to combine into one are pretty slim.

We got twins, twins.

They're combining.

What's more likely to happen

is that their different rotations would disrupt each other.

They're not going to form some super tornado.

Now we do see out in the field storm chasing two tornadoes

happen at once from time to time it's super rare,

but you can have a main tornado

and outside of that have satellite tornadoes that form

that are much smaller and much weaker tornadoes.

As for your second question.

You think you can disrupt a tornado?

Can we actually disrupt tornadoes in real life?

Eh, not really.

The technology is not there yet,

nor the knowledge to be able

to control the weather in any way.

The absolute closest we can get

is through some very basic cloud seeding,

putting some chemicals into the atmosphere

and their naturally occurring chemicals

and allows condensation to happen

and allows storms to precipitate out or to rain.

That can increase precipitation

that a storm is gonna put out by 10 to 15%.

So the effects of cloud seeding are super negligible

and that's really the only thing we can do these days

to kind of control the weather.

@ThisIsMyHandle says, What causes heat waves?

I can't figure it out.

Heat waves are when you have very hot air persistent

over a location for a very long period of time.

Sometimes you can have heat waves that form,

say along the gulf where you've got strong southerly winds

or flow that keep other storms away.

You have high pressure there

and the sun just beats down on you

and allows that humidity to pour in

and the temperatures to climb.

And heat waves can be particularly deadly, not so much

because of the actual ambient temperature of the air,

but due to the heat index.

So that's when you combine the temperature

of the air plus the moisture of the air, the humidity,

if it's extra humid, the sweat on your body,

which is your natural air conditioning system,

doesn't evaporate and doesn't allow you to cool.

So it may be 95 degrees out,

but with really high humidity, it could feel more like 105.

@ActuallyKatedee asks, So a hurricane is coming

and I can literally smell it.

It smells exactly how the sky smells before a tornado.

Who else can smell storms?

Actually, when you're smelling rain, oddly enough,

what you're smelling is some

of the different pollutants in the atmosphere.

So when you have this warm rain fall down,

particularly on asphalt,

you can actually have a chemical reaction

that increases some chemicals in the atmosphere temporarily,

which are the ones that you can smell

and that's why you can smell rain.

Sometimes people can feel it

in their bones or in their muscles.

Our atmosphere is really heavy

and it's pushing on us constantly

with about 15 pounds per square inch

on your body every single day.

But that can vary.

When we have high pressure

that may be more like 16 pounds per square inch

and with low pressure, it's more like 14,

that air acts like a natural compression instrument for us.

And when we have lower pressure, less air is pushing on you.

You have less pressure on your joints and your muscles.

And this is why during low pressure,

some people feel achiness or soreness in their muscles,

especially from old injuries

and why some people also get headaches.

Hunter T wants to know how much energy could we generate

from a hurricane.

Now it would be really hard to capture energy

from a hurricane, but hurricanes are incredibly powerful.

People estimate that a hurricane

is able to release as much energy in a day

as the entire world consumes in a day.

Some people estimate the average lifecycle

of a hurricane can generate as much electricity

as 10,000 nuclear bombs.

So Baby Gorgeous asks, Question for meteorologist friends,

what happens when two hurricanes hit each other?

Do they break up or combine?

If two hurricanes were in fact to hit each other

and collide, they would actually break down

the systems in each storm.

Hurricanes are a little bit like an engine

and they run on a very specific fuel,

which is that warm ocean water.

They have set circulations in them,

and this is what allows a hurricane to last

for a really long period of time.

If they were to hit, it would be very similar

to two cars on the highway colliding.

It's not like it would form some supercar.

You would just have two really wrecked cars.

Bryce Jones asks,

Can lightning strike the same place twice?

And can tornadoes cross rivers and mountains?

Yes and yes.

Lightning can absolutely strike the same place twice.

It can strike the same place twice in the same storm.

Now, it doesn't necessarily have to,

but there are some places around the world

that actually receive multiple lightning strikes

within specific storms.

Typically, they're at higher elevations.

The tallest buildings in New York City

can be hit multiple times in a single storm.

And your second question,

can tornadoes cross rivers and mountains?

Yes, absolutely.

Now with mountains, you could potentially disrupt some

of the airflow that's involved with a tornado

and some of the supporting structure

of the thunderstorm itself.

But I have absolutely seen tornadoes occur

in mountainous locations

and tornadoes do not have a fear of water.

They will absolutely cross it without any problem.

Anyone who tells you a tornado will not cross a body

of water, a river, or anything like that,

it's a complete myth.

@FadedFairy asks,

Why does thunder sound like the world is ending?

Thunder is actually just hot expanding air.

When that lightning strike occurs,

it heats up the air around it so fast,

it actually breaks the sound barrier.

And what you're hearing is basically like a sonic boom

and that rumbles through the atmosphere.

After you see the lightning count five seconds

and after five seconds, if you hear the thunder

that lightning strike was one mile away,

after 10 seconds,

that lightning strike would've been two miles away.

One of the most important lightning safety tips out there

is the 30 30 rule.

A lot of lightning comes out the backside of thunderstorms.

After you see the last lightning strike,

wait 30 more minutes before you go outside.

@TheeChueya asks, How much energy

does a lightning strike have?

Lightning strikes can have various amounts of energy in 'em,

but I can tell you the lightning strike itself

is five times hotter than the surface of the sun.

Lightning is just a release of static electricity.

When you were a kid

and you used to rub your bare feet on the carpet

and then touch your sibling and zap them.

Lightning is very similar, lots of ice particles

or rubbing together, creating static electricity.

You'll see this strike that goes

from the sky down to the ground.

It's the electricity trying to balance itself out.

Again, areas of low concentration of electrons, trying

to balance out with areas of hike,

concentrations of electrons.

If you're ever standing outside during a storm

or maybe there's rain nearby or maybe even like a town over,

and you start to feel all the hair on the back of your neck,

stand up, that's a bad sign

that you may be hit by lightning.

If you're in an open body of water

like the ocean or in a pool and a thunderstorm moves in,

please get out of that water and go inside

because water is a big conductor of electricity.

And so if lightning hits that pond that you're in,

or that pool or that body of water,

it could electrocute you as well.

So these are all the questions for today.

Make sure that when you're out there,

you're weather aware and not scared.

Thanks for watching Severe Weather Support.

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