Help me please.

[sebenste]

Thermal gradients, eh? Well, you can do a nice write-up on one of my most interesting chases. The Utica, IL tornado of April 20, 2004. Had car trouble and missed a racquetball get-together, but then it started working in time for me in time to go chase that storm (yeah, I know, the first and LAST time that might happen to ANY chaser! ).

That occurred along a warm frontal boundary that was supposed to be clouded over all day long. Had 3 hours worth of sunshine that was unexpected, and suddenly, a few hundred J/KG of CAPE turned out to be between 1K-2K in the most unstable layer. You know what happened after that...I accidently drove through the last tornado in Sheridan in what was the most violently rotating wall cloud I have ever seen. Stoopid thing produced an F0 spinup on the far north side of the wall cloud, and I learned a big lesson that day.

Hmmm, that got wayyyy off track, sorry. Lots of people do reports on severe weather events, but I think even more important is the failure to forecast such events, or to bust when everything "looks great".

And if you have any questions, walk 4 floors up and ask me.

 

[Blake Michaleski]

Maybe something like finding a conceptual synoptic model of a system that produces a marginal chase day... narrow it down to a particular region.... high plains, southern plains, midwest, etc...

find several systems that only produced one or two tornadoes and evaluate the synoptic structure in detail.



Sounds like a good project.... synoptic was by far my favorite class although my research has always concentrated in mesoscale features and theory.

 

[Paul Knightley]

I think the formation of tornadoes from misocyclones along a fast-moving cold front would be great. We get a number of tornadoes/wind damage reports a year from such fronts in the UK.
With this topic, you get to mention all the things (dynamically) which go along with such powerful fronts; you get to mention fluid dynamics (as the front often acts as a density current caused both forced and released ascent along the line); wind shear, etc etc.