FYFD

Tag: tornado

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    “Pursuit”

    Photographer Mike Olbinski has released yet another breathtaking timelapse film of weather over the Great Plains. This one has a little bit of everything: storms, tornadoes, incredible cloud formations, and even sunny days. Olbinski’s work is a reminder that there’s a constant beautiful drama playing out over our heads if we just take the time to watch. Under blue skies, condensation and turbulence are building towering mountains, and even when the sky is gray, it can be churning like the ocean just over your head. The U.S. Great Plains may be home to particularly dramatic examples of this behavior (thanks largely to the atmospheric influence of the Rocky Mountains), but these same phenomena are going on all the time overhead. (Video and image credits: M. Olbinski)

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  • Simulating Thunderstorms

    Simulating Thunderstorms

    With today’s supercomputing power, it’s possible to simulate entire thunderstorms to study how and why some of them can spawn deadly tornadoes. The animation above comes from a computer simulation of a supercell thunderstorm. The simulation uses initial conditions from a 2011 storm that produced an EF-5 tornado – the highest category of tornado, based on its wind speeds. To see more of the simulation, check out the video below. One thing that might surprise you is just how enormous the towering supercell clouds are compared to the tornado produced in the simulation. Often what we can see of a storm from the ground is only the tiniest part of what goes into producing it. (Image credit: L. Orf et al., source; GIF via @popsci; video credit: UWSSEC)

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    “Pulse”

    Photographer Mike Olbinski returns with another incredible storm-chasing timelapse video, this time all in black-and-white. To me, that choice helps “Pulse” emphasize the ominous majesty of these supercells and tornadoes by highlighting the textures that make up the clouds. Watching clouds in timelapse, they seem to materialize from nowhere as moisture drawn up from the land cools and condenses. Sped up, suddenly the convective rotation and the roiling turbulence inside clouds is perfectly clear. I especially love the sequence beginning at 2:25, where a distant black line slowly transforms into an incredible landscape marked with successive waves of rolling, turbulent clouds. Watch this one on a large screen at a high resolution, if you can. You won’t regret it! (Video credit: M. Olbinski)

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    “Vorticity”

    Photographer Mike Olbinski is back with another storm-chasing timelapse entitled “Vorticity”. Like his previous work, this film is a breath-taking example of physics in action. It is well worth taking a few minutes to watch in fullscreen, at high resolution, and with headphones. Olbinski’s timelapses beautifully capture the incredible dynamic motion of our atmosphere. Fittingly, “Vorticity” is all about the swirling, roiling motion of supercell thunderstorms and the tornadoes they can spawn, but the film also captures many other great phenomena from the convection that builds clouds to unusual formations like undulatus asperatus and mammatus clouds. (Video credit: M. Olbinski; submitted by Paul vdB)

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    “The Chase”

    Sometimes it takes timelapse photography to truly appreciate the dynamic behavior of our atmosphere. In “The Chase” Mike Olbinski, whose work we’ve featured previously, has captured some of the most incredible and stunning weather timelapse footage I have ever seen. Despite watching it repeatedly, I continue to be awed to the point that I have no words. Seriously, just watch it. Be amazed by the drama of our sky. (Video credit: M. Olbinski)

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    Lab-borne Tornadoes

    Conventional wind tunnels are great, but some aerodynamic testing requires facilities of a different nature. The video above is from the WindEEE dome, a hexagonal chamber with sixty fans on one wall, eight directional fans on the other five walls, and six fans in the upper chamber. Each is individually computer controlled, allowing the researchers to create straight flows as well as complex vortical ones. The video shows their tornado flow, which stands 5 m tall and swirls at 30 m/s. They can also move the tornado around the chamber at 2 m/s. This capability enables a kind of scale-model analysis of tornadoes and their impact that’s not possible in most facilities. You can read more about the dome at New Scientist or the WindEEE website. (Video credit: New Scientist/WindEEE; submitted by entropy-perturbation)

  • Other Ig Nobel Fluids

    Other Ig Nobel Fluids

    To round out our series on fluid dynamics in the Ig Nobel Prizes (which are not the same thing as the actual Nobel Prizes), here are some of the other winners. Last year Mayer and Krechetnikov won for a study on coffee sloshing when people walk. We’ve mentioned the pitch-drop experiment measuring the viscosity of an extremely viscous fluid a couple times; Mainstone and Parnell won a 2005 Ig Nobel for that (on-going) work. Another 2005 prize went to Meyer-Rochow and Gal for calculating the pressures involved in penguin defecation. (Yes, seriously.) A avian-related award was also handed out to B. Vonnegut for estimating tornado wind speeds by their ability to strip a chicken of its feathers. And, finally, for those looking to interest undergraduate lab students in mathematics and fluid dynamics, I suggest following the lead of 2002 winner A. Leike who demonstrates laws of exponential decay with beer head. (Photo credit: S. Depolo)

  • Fluids Round-up – 9 June 2013

    Fluids Round-up – 9 June 2013

    It’s time for some more fluidsy fun around the Internet! Here are some fun links I’ve come across since our last round-up.

    (Photo credit: L. L. A. Adams et al., multi-fluid double emulsions)

  • Mercedes-Benz Tornado

    Mercedes-Benz Tornado

    The world’s most powerful artificial tornado is part of the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. Though popular enough with visitors that the staff will bring out smoke generators to make it visible, the tornado was not built as an attraction – It’s actually part of the building’s fire protection system. The modern open design of the museum meant that conventional smoke removal systems were inadequate. Instead vorticity is generated in the central lobby with 144 wall-mounted jets. The angular velocity created by the jets is strongest at the middle, in the vortex core, due to conservation of angular momentum – exactly the way a spinning ice skater speeds up by pulling his arms in. The core of the vortex is a low pressure area, which draws outside air toward it – this is how the tornado pulls in smoke when there is a fire. The fan on the ceiling provides the pressure draw necessary for the smoke to be pulled up and out of the building at a supposed rate of 4 tons per minute. See the tornado in action here. (Photo credit: Mercedes-Benz Passion; submitted by Ivan)

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    Antibubbles

    Antibubbles–a liquid droplet surrounded by a thin film of gas and immersed in more liquid–are fragile things.  This video explores how antibubbles behave when placed in proximity to a tornado-like whirl. When placed near the eye, where fluid motion is primarily vertical, the antibubble is stretched vertically.  When placed in the rotating eyewall, the antibubble is distorted into a ring-like shape before it breaks down. (Video credit: D. Terwagne et al; APS Gallery of Fluid Motion 2009)