News DetailMay 4, 2007 tornado video to be used for research on helical suction vortices!
Posted At: May 15, 2007 @ 3:04 PM
Posted By: Reed Timmer
Related Categories: Tornadoes
A research scientist at the University of Oklahoma will be using our May 4, 2007 Ellis Co., OK tornado video for a research project on helical suction vortices within tornadoes. Since we were close to this tornado, we could see several mini-vortices rotating rapidly within the tornado on numerous occasions. Here are some frame captures of these mini-suction vortices.
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We've been forced to temporarily disable the comments on the blog...We had an unfortunately situation with a loser posting content inappropriate for our younger crowd. We'll likely have to set up some sort of membership from here on out so that we can have better control over these situations. We'll have the comments enabled later this evening.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
If you do go to a membership type deal will it cost anything?
Toby - No at this point all services will remain free of charge.
Jason
Good to hear that your footage is beeing used for scientific reasons, congrats.
Sad that some people can't act mature and spoil it for so many. The person involved should consider his actions.
Ok just wondering thanks.......Still trying to raise the money for GRLevel programs lol...........Thanks for the website guys, I have learned more this spring than I ever have.
Toby
I find it sad that jerks have to ruin this for everyone else... It's so immature. Anyway, I bet a small forum would be pretty cool...if you guys decide to make one for this site at any point in the future, I have past and current moderator experience and would be glad to help out!
And again, congrats on the vid being used for research!
With regards to the research... is the fellow who is going to analyze the footage going to attempt any photogrammetry? I think this is an excellent opportunity to get some measurements of near-ground wind speeds and compare them with the damage that occurred at the ground.
Simon...I believe he's using the footage as evidence of modeled suction vortices...We provided our Manchester footage for photogrammetry research, but the debris was not nearly as clear as in May 4. Do you know anyone involved in this type of research??
We very roughly estimated the winds to be over 200 mph in the main funnel, and likey higher in the sub-vortices.
Can't give you any names right now... but maybe you could talk to the folks who are doing it with the Manchester footage. There's always Tim Samaras, he did it with the Storm Lake, Iowa tornado.
What kind of damage did you see with this tornado (ground scouring, pavement removal, tree debarking)? I want to get a better idea of wind speeds and vegetation damage, because in most cases, that's the only damage that is produced with Canadian tornadoes. Fujita did create an F-scale series for corn damage (in his memoirs, using egs. from the Plainfield, Ill. event), but most meteorologists I've spoken to are very skeptical about the accuracy of using vegetation to rate damage.
As far as I'm concerned, though, it's still better than giving potentially violent tornadoes an EF-0 rating because they didn't hit any structures!