Gravity Waves Make Tornados

[lurkey]

Gravity Waves Make Tornadoes

03.19.2008

March 19, 2008: Did you know that there's a new breakfast food that helps meteorologists predict severe storms? Down South they call it "GrITs."

GrITs stands for Gravity wave Interactions with Tornadoes. "It's a computer model I developed to study how atmospheric gravity waves interact with severe storms," says research meteorologist Tim Coleman of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

According to Coleman, wave-storm interactions are very important. If a gravity wave hits a rotating thunderstorm, it can sometimes spin that storm up into a tornado.

Continued here . . including two videos

[Ed Mahmoud]

A gravity wave from earlier convection in Arkansas may or may not have initiated not the tornado, but the parent storms, on the dry line during the Jarrell, TX area tornado outbreak back in 1997.

[Cyclenall]

This is really weird, I've never seen anything like that before in the sky. The video looked like it was sped up but the minutes at the bottom seemed to go by slowly compared to how fast the clouds were moving.

Thanks for posting this neat write up.