Rumor has it that Navy pilots stationed at Key West used to fly through waterspouts just for the kick of it. Supposedly they could come out with a 90° course change if they hit it just right. Navy brass frowned on the practice, as the extreme G's put the pilot and plane at great risk. I don't...
What "new models" are under consideration?
Recent research demonstrated that even with fine-grain in situ data (such as numerous anemometers under the storms, and dual Doppler radars less than 15 km away), and given plenty of time to post-process the data, supercells that produce tornadoes...
Hey Steve,
I have never seen any evidence of there being more than one mesocyclone (the large, rotating updraft) inside a supercell. The mesocyclone typically has a diameter of something like 2 km, which is the diameter of a very large tornado. While there can be tornadoes anywhere in the...
Well put, Steve.
It's ironic that we think that certain things are acts of God, about which we can do nothing, while we spend the rest of our time running around taking care of the things that we know we can change. And yet everything we do was once considered impossible. It is our nature as...
No, I don't know the ionization energy for molecular nitrogen -- sorry. :/
Actually, we know that ionization is definitely possible at lower voltages. A corona discharge (which in the atmosphere would be called St. Elmo's Fire) occurs in STP air at roughly 100 kV/m, or 1/30 the potential...
:)))))) I just can't resist this -- you left too much up to the imagination there... :)))))
Nuking tornadoes would definitely work. It might not actually prevent the tornado. But after nuking the whole city, nobody is really going to notice whether or not a tornado came in and stirred up the...
In any open-air thermodynamic system, it is certainly true that all of the energy is going to get released sooner or later, and disrupting one thunderstorm could certainly cause another thunderstorm somewhere else. But the chance of that secondary thunderstorm becoming a supercell is 1 in 1,000...
Warning and prevention are not necessarily unrelated issues. Both require that we understand the phenomenon. 60 years and a billion dollars have been spent attempting to understand tornadic storms. I think it's time we try something different for a while, especially since what I'm talking about...
Assuming that tornadoes are a purely thermodynamic phenomenon, and considering the amount of thermodynamic energy getting expended in a supercell thunderstorm, I agree with the "flee on a dog" description.
But the principles of thermodynamics don't even begin to adequately describe tornadoes...
Homework Statement
I have an electric field that is nominally 30 kV/m, and I'm trying to figure out if nitrogen could be getting ionized in a field of that strength.
The 1st ionization energy of nitrogen is 1402.3 kJ mol-1.
What is the relationship between joules/mole and...
In the case of electronic instruments, the shape doesn't matter much. ;)
What James said was correct, but I'll put it another way, if it helps.
Timbre is the collection of frequencies in a sound. We think of a musical note as being one specific pitch, or frequency. But a musical instrument...
Thanks so much for responding!
I'm looking for a force beyond the Lorentz force. I think that in my thought experiments, I've come to the conclusion that it does not exist. Nevertheless, I have a phenomenon that I can't explain except with EM, and I'm just trying to figure out HOW it's EM. ;)...
Homework Statement
I'm trying to work out a theoretical problem, and I don't know how to approach it. Suppose I have a charged gas that is traveling near the surface of a magnetically-responsive solid.
I would expect the charged gas to be generating a magnetic field. I would also expect...