Dr Joshua Wurman - understanding rain and hail in a supercell
Post categories: Videos, guest bloggers, locations, storm chase 2011, storms
|08:00 UK time, Friday, 29 July 2011
Distance travelled ~ 538'572'800 km
(Dr Joshua Wurman created the Doppler On Wheels (DOW) mobile radars which observe tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and other phenomena from close range. He has been actively chasing storms, for science, since 1995. One of the key objectives of the research carried out by him and his colleagues is to better understand what generates a tornado)
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Dr. J oshua Wurman - Well the radar can measure both winds and precipitation, rain and hail inside the storm. So we can see the red area here, which is precipitation, rain and hail in a super cell, and then these browns and blues here represent different wind speeds, different Doppler wind speeds. And then there are other fields, we can also look at the difference in the return from horizontal and vertical polarised microwaves and we can tell the difference between hail and rain. Rain, big raindrops look kind of like hamburger buns and they return more energy horizontally, and then vertically, so we can tell if it is heavy rain. Hail stones are very irregularly shaped and they are also tumbling, so if we look at a million of them in our radar volume they average out to zero orientation, so we can tell the difference between hail and rain, like in the areas we were just experiencing outside.
HelenCzerski- So we've got all this data that the truck is measuring, so what can we see?
Kate Humble:
Helen Czerski:
Stephen Marsh:
Aira Idris:
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