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When Mother Nature wields her fury through natural disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, weather forecasters and emergency personnel alert local communities based on input they’ve received from event modeling and simulations. With the help of National Science Foundation-funding, these technologies can now provide highly localized, real-time data.
In the case of a tornado, simulations like the one pictured here provide forecasters with valuable information such as wind speed, air flow and pressure. The orange and blue wisps represent the rising and falling airflow around the tornado.Image credit: Bob Wilhelmson, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Lou Wicker, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Severe Storms Laboratory; Matt Gilmore and Lee Cronce, University of Illinois Atmospheric Science Department. Visualization by Donna Cox, Robert Patterson, Stuart Levy, Matt Hall and Alex Betts, NCSA
