We Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest with Three 1,000-Foot Walls

Beyond the boundaries of established science an avalanche of exotic ideas compete for our attention. Experts tell us that these ideas should not be permitted to take up the time of working scientists, and for the most part they are surely correct. But what about the gems in the rubble pile? By what ground-rules might we bring extraordinary new possibilities to light?

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Osmosis
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Re: We Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest with Three 1,000-Foot W

Unread post by Osmosis » Sun Jul 13, 2014 8:33 pm

Ok Charles-who has the sounding rockets and rolls of wire? :)

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CharlesChandler
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Re: We Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest with Three 1,000-Foot W

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Mon Jul 14, 2014 1:05 am

Osmosis wrote:Ok Charles-who has the sounding rockets and rolls of wire? :)
Well, here's the problem. In order to fire rockets into a cloudy sky, you need to get a "certificate of authorization" from FAA, which is a special exception to a law precluding anybody firing rockets into FAA airspace (i.e., above 500 feet), especially if it is cloudy. The reason is simple: that's where the airplanes are. They're especially nervous about people firing rockets into clouds, because if there was an airplane in the cloud, you wouldn't see it before you shot it down. So they're very serious about this, and anybody who attempts this without authorization is going straight to jail. Now here's the catch: they won't even consider an application for a special exception unless the applicant is publicly funded. Their reasoning is that if some other public institution (federal, state, or local) has already signed off on the project, then at least somebody thinks it's worthwhile, and therefore FAA will go ahead and consider it. But no public funding, no application for a special exception. And there's the problem -- I can't get any public institution to vouch for me. The official NWS position is that EM plays no role in tornadoes. Offline, one noted authority on the topic (who I cannot name because it was personal correspondence) said that there may well be an EM component in tornadoes, but it would cost more than it would be worth to pursue it. I told him that I'd pay for it myself. The rockets are $700 apiece, and I'd be willing to drop a few thousand to see what they would do. And there would be no worry about hitting any airplanes, because it would do me no good to fire rockets unless there was a tornado in progress, and no airplane can withstand the conditions inside a tornadic supercell (at least not in the bottom 1 mile, which is the vertical range of the rockets). But he said that if I submitted my paper to any reputable journal and he was asked to referee it, he would reject it, and he was notable enough to be just such a person. Similarly, every other door that I knocked on got slammed in my face. So no, there isn't going to be any public funding, so there isn't going to be any certificate of authorization. So the rocket test will have to wait.

But there is one project that I'm trying to organize that would be worth doing, and would be a bit cheaper anyway. My investigations have led me to the opinion that tornadoes and waterspouts are fundamentally related, and what you learn about one bears directly on the other. The interesting thing is that waterspouts are a lot easier to catch. There are roughly 400 of them per year off of the Florida Keys, and in any 2 week period, in a high-speed motorboat, you could expect at least 2 successful intercepts, and if you got lucky, you might get more than that. The reason for the ease is partly because these things are so common, but also because a high-speed motorboat has distinct advantages over trying to use cars to chase tornadoes. A car has to follow the roads, whereas a motorboat can travel as the crow flies, and while the roads have legal and/or physical limits on how fast you can go, you can make much better time in an offshore high-speed boat (> 70 mph). So I've been trying organize a 2 week trip to the Florida Keys during waterspout season, where we'd rent a boat and some scientific gear, and get into the inflow of some waterspouts, to measure the space charge. I'm saying that the tornadic inflow is charged, and that the electric force between it and the ground (or water) is holding it down, and thereby altering the fluid dynamics, from a normal suction vortex, which wouldn't do any damage, to a tornadic vortex, which can destroy everything in its path. But don't worry -- waterspout winds are in the EF1 range, and if the boat can handle 70 mph winds getting to the waterspout, it will have no problem with the 70 mph winds inside the waterspout. And without anything perturbing their path, waterspouts move quite predictably across the water. So the intercepts don't have any of the risks of land-based tornado chasing.

The inflow is easy to detect if the vortex is over the water. Contrary to the principles of fluid dynamics, the bulk of inflow to a tornado is all in a discrete channel.

http://charles-chandler.org/Geophysics/ ... rspout.jpg

So I want to get photographic and anemometer evidence that we got into the inflow channel, and I want to get space charge data, to make/break my contention that the air has a strong positive electric charge. I already know that it is, for a variety of reasons. For example, in fluid dynamics, skin friction increases with the square of the velocity. As a consequence, the inflow to a vortex should be axisymmetric, since anything that tries to flow faster will encounter exponentially more friction. Yet we can clearly see in that photograph that there is a huge disparity in flow rates. In fact, they successfully deployed some flares, and you can clearly see that outside of the inflow channel, the air is actually blowing away from the vortex. In fluid dynamics, this kind of selective response to a suction vortex is evidence of the presence of two different fluids, one with a much lower viscosity, which tunnels through the other to get into the vortex. "Two-fluid" simulations are easy to set up in CFD applications, and this phenomenon is easy to demonstrate in the lab. The problem for the standard model of the atmosphere is that there shouldn't be two fluids up there -- the air should be well-mixed. Differences in temperature and humidity in the relevant ranges can account for no more that a 6% difference in kinematic viscosity, while the inflow channel to a tornado regularly travels 800% faster than the ambient air (if it's even flowing toward the tornado at all). Aside from temperature and humidity, the only other property that air can possibly have, and which could very definitely affect viscosity, is electric charge. Plasmas are well known to behave as ideal gases (i.e., frictionless). So that's definitely charged air. But direct measurements with the proper instrumentation will be a lot more convincing. So that's what I'd like to do.
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The Electromagnetic Nature of Tornadic Supercell Thunderstorms

Drakekay
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Re: We Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest with Three 1,000-Foot W

Unread post by Drakekay » Fri Jul 18, 2014 5:44 pm

OMG You figured out how the aliens on Jupiter created that Super Storm. Can you imagine the density you would be placing in the middle of so many layers of atmosphere. I can just see the diagrams depicting massive gusts of wind traveling around the walls, and how dead hush the wind would be inside. The sun would almost never be seen until well into the middle of the day. At which time the internal climate, wind & moisture, and landscape would be cooked or excited in a rather amplified manner. The walls would provide a path of least resistance which in turn will be resonated throughout the internal area, creating a localized path of least resistance raining down on the surface of the entire area inside the walls. Or course, I'm just exaggerating for the thrill of enjoyment. I wonder which is greater, These three walls or the great wall of China? The idea has merit but I wonder what such a change would do to the system as a whole, and will that change nullify the effect we desire?



I think a more elegant approach would be to recolonize ALL of the landscape of America with dense forests and allow it to run wild and untouched while encapsulating our cities and their inter-connectivity separately with internal controlled nature. Before you discount the concept of greening a desert take a look at its viability. The cost of these walls would out way the cost of planting a forest in an equal proportion, with a comparison of resources, time, manpower, etc. Even if you include the additional requirements to clean up a damaged ecosystem. But lets not ignore the environmental ramifications of returning an entire landscape to nature.

Maol
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Re: We Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest with Three 1,000-Foot W

Unread post by Maol » Sun Jul 20, 2014 1:29 pm

Why not balloons on long grounded tethers? Filled with Hydrogen a lightning strike would be a great light show.

fosborn_
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Re: We Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest with Three 1,000-Foot W

Unread post by fosborn_ » Sat Jun 10, 2017 11:03 am

CharlesChandler wrote:
http://charles-chandler.org/Geophysics/ ... rspout.jpg

So I want to get photographic and anemometer evidence that we got into the inflow channel, and I want to get space charge data, to make/break my contention that the air has a strong positive electric charge. I already know that it is, for a variety of reasons. For example, in fluid dynamics, skin friction increases with the square of the velocity. As a consequence, the inflow to a vortex should be axisymmetric, since anything that tries to flow faster will encounter exponentially more friction. Yet we can clearly see in that photograph that there is a huge disparity in flow rates. In fact, they successfully deployed some flares, and you can clearly see that outside of the inflow channel, the air is actually blowing away from the vortex. In fluid dynamics, this kind of selective response to a suction vortex is evidence of the presence of two different fluids, one with a much lower viscosity, which tunnels through the other to get into the vortex. "Two-fluid" simulations are easy to set up in CFD applications, and this phenomenon is easy to demonstrate in the lab. The problem for the standard model of the atmosphere is that there shouldn't be two fluids up there -- the air should be well-mixed. Differences in temperature and humidity in the relevant ranges can account for no more that a 6% difference in kinematic viscosity, while the inflow channel to a tornado regularly travels 800% faster than the ambient air (if it's even flowing toward the tornado at all). Aside from temperature and humidity, the only other property that air can possibly have, and which could very definitely affect viscosity, is electric charge. Plasmas are well known to behave as ideal gases (i.e., frictionless). So that's definitely charged air. But direct measurements with the proper instrumentation will be a lot more convincing. So that's what I'd like to do.
axisymmetric

Would this be a good example?
I got pretty excited when my wife showed this to me on her facebook page..
http://coffeebreak.theepochtimes.com/uncategorized/canadian-lawn-mowing-dad-defies-twister-in-hilarious-snapshot.html
http://coffeebreak.theepochtimes.com/uncategorized/canadian-lawn-mowing-dad-defies-twister-in-hilarious-snapshot.html
video..
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... 527&type=3
The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
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is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
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CharlesChandler
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Re: We Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest with Three 1,000-Foot W

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Sat Jun 10, 2017 2:40 pm

fosborn_ wrote:
axisymmetric
Would this be a good example?
That isn't an example of what I was talking about. That vortex IS axisymmetric, in that the axis goes up through the centerline of the vortex, and the vortex is the same in all directions from each point on that axis, on a plane that is perpendicular to the axis. That vortex just happens to be an example of a tornado that has a dust sheath AND a condensation funnel. So as you go up the axis, what you get when you radiate out perpendicular to the axis changes, depending on elevation. But technically, that's still axisymmetric.

What I was talking about was asymmetry in the inflow.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll spend the rest of the day sitting in a small boat, drinking beer and telling dirty jokes.

Volcanoes
Astrophysics wants its physics back.
The Electromagnetic Nature of Tornadic Supercell Thunderstorms

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