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Severe Weather 2025

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You lose me the minute you start with math. I was never one of these guys who could figure out anything with math very well.
 
slenker said:
I’m highly skeptical of this idea, despite the plethora of sources being shown. After reading some bits and pieces of the abstracts and references here, I’m seeing some numbers that are just absurd.

Small nitpick with your post: Amperes is the measure of current, not charge. But to someone who doesn’t have a background in physics, it’s understandable to get a lot of this mixed up.

This paper that I cannot fully access due to being behind what I believe to be a paywall has an abstract that states that tornadoes are responsible for about 135,000 coulombs of charge transfer. If you know anything about EM, this number seems unbelievably ludicrous, and to me seems inconsistent with the idea that there’s a current of ~225 amps running through a tornado. Now unfortunately, I cannot see the rest of the paper, so there’s no way I can safely assume they reached these numbers in an irrational or rational way, but I’m disliking this already, to say the least.

This number is ridiculous though. For example, if you somehow managed to freeze time and teleport 1 C of pure charge just sitting out in the open, it’s about on the order of 10^19 electrons sitting in a single spot undisturbed. If you then turned time on, that 1 C would seek to neutralize itself with over 5 billion joules of energy. That’s a bigger explosion than one ton of TNT.

This paper shows mathematics and a strong foundation for how to get a very rough idea of what the magnetic field in a tornado would potentially look like. There’s a huge issue though: In the conclusions section, it states that the calculated magnetic field would be on the order of ~0.2-2 T (Tesla). This is a very strong magnetic field. It’s comparable to MRI machines. If this occurred I feel like anyone going through a tornado, even in a basement, with anything metal on them whatsoever would become minced meat in a far more gruesome way than even an EF5 could do. But forget that: why have we never heard of ferromagnetic objects being attracted to the center of a tornadic vortex? This to me is the ultimate reason why I can’t see this being a possibility. I could be wrong, but there’s a lot here that just doesn’t seem to add up.

Seeing as there’s a plethora of resources to read here about the subject, I don’t want to call crock on it. In fact, there’s probably some legitimacy to it that I’m not seeing, not yet at least. I need to dig deeper. The reason why I’m so invested in this is because I do have a background in physics and this idea just screams crackpot to me despite there being actual papers on it. It just sounds like the electric universe people who believe gravity doesn’t exist when they try and fail to apply electrodynamics to every single situation, on the surface at least.
Click to expand...

Was hoping you'd have some input. I'm not sure the insane energy levels are the most far-fetched concept in the study. I've seen multiple claims over the years that tornadoes release more energy than nuclear bombs.

Here's one such claim:

The 2013 Moore Tornado Released More Energy than the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb | UC Geography

legacy.geog.ucsb.edu legacy.geog.ucsb.edu

Your point about metal is interesting though. You'd think an immensely powerful electro magnet would have magnetic properties. I wonder if the full text of the study explains that part in more detail.

Maybe it has something to do with the thermodynamics involved somehow? Or maybe the electromagnetism helps explain why the forward right quadrant of tornadoes are usually the most destructive. Would definitely explain how some of the most powerful tornadoes move train tracks and rip up plumbing.

This stuff is fun to think about.
 
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Grand Poo Bah said:
Was hoping you'd have some input. I'm not sure the insane energy levels are the most far-fetched concept in the study. I've seen multiple claims over the years that tornadoes release more energy than nuclear bombs.

Here's one such claim:

The 2013 Moore Tornado Released More Energy than the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb | UC Geography

legacy.geog.ucsb.edu legacy.geog.ucsb.edu

Your point about metal is interesting though. You'd think an immensely powerful electro magnet would have magnetic properties. I wonder if the full text of the study explains that part in more detail.

Maybe it has something to do with the thermodynamics involved somehow? Or maybe the electromagnetism helps explain why the forward right quadrant of tornadoes are usually the most destructive. Would definitely explain how some of the most powerful tornadoes move train tracks and rip up plumbing.

This stuff is fun to think about.
Click to expand...
I've been trying to find a paper or anything that shows an explicit calculation of the energy released in Moore 2013, and I can't - I just keep seeing "experts estimate..." which isn't me saying that it's invalid, it's just weird that I can't find it. The way they say they calculated it is very vague and can be interpreted in a lot of different ways:

apnews.com

Power of Moore tornado dwarfs Hiroshima bomb

WASHINGTON (AP) — Everything had to come together just perfectly to create the killer tornado in Moore, Okla.: wind speed, moisture in the air, temperature and timing.
apnews.com apnews.com
"Several meteorologists contacted by The Associated Press used real time measurements, some made by Schumacher, to calculate the energy released during the storm’s 40-minute life span. Their estimates ranged from 8 times to more than 600 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, with more experts at the high end. Their calculations were based on energy measured in the air and then multiplied over the size and duration of the storm." (Associated Press, Borenstein, 2013).

The highlighted part is weird to me - and I would need to see the calculation explicitly explained in a step-by-step fashion because of how vague it is. For example, what types of energy were taken into account in this calculation (kinetic, electromagnetic, potential, etc.) I'm guessing as many as possible, but: How did you determine the "size" of the storm? Was it only the tornado, and if it was, where was the boundary specified? One thing I will note is that the range is absolutely enormous here, and I definitely do believe it released at least a couple atomic bombs' worth of energy with absolute certainty, considering its size, power, and duration. A paper on this would hopefully clear these questions up.

Another thing to note is that the calculation would have had to have been extremely imprecise, as taking into account the constantly changing characteristics of a tornadic vortex is simply not possible unless you make some extremely broad assumptions and model the tornado in an overly idealized way. Otherwise, even humanity's strongest supercomputer would take eons to attempt to calculate something that would probably fail in its prediction anyways. Of course, this can be reflected in the very wide range of energies presented by these articles (8x to 600x Hiroshima). However, I assumed that most of this energy was mechanical in some way, which on the surface seems realistic to me.

As for thermodynamics, you would be talking about statistical mechanics, which is by far my weakest branch of physics and I cannot comment on it in any strong capacity until I have read a textbook on it (I plan on reading up Thermal Physics by Blundell this summer to prep myself for grad school). I remain strongly skeptical on the role electromagnetism plays in the total energy output of a tornado, as the 150,000 C of charge thing would imply that the majority of the energy released by Moore 2013 was electromagnetic if I am to take these Hiroshima calculations at face-value. I find that intuitively very hard to believe, but I honestly really just don't know. To give an example of why this number seems instantly erroneous to me, a lightning strike releases about 10-100 C of charge normally, so this would be at least three orders of magnitude above that purely in the electromagnetic department.

This is beyond a surface-level analysis and I would need to dig a good amount deeper to come to a more reasonable conclusion - I don't have time for that right now because I'm busy with UG studies and prepping for graduation right now. A lot of my inherent bias against this comes from electric universe cranks and people without an understanding of electromagnetism attempt to describe everything with it, and it simply doesn't work. There are a lot more people like that than you would expect, and they really annoy me. So forgive me if I come off as a little standoff-ish here, or if it sounds like I'm just writing off these claims, because I most certainly am not. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
 
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slenker said:
I've been trying to find a paper or anything that shows an explicit calculation of the energy released in Moore 2013, and I can't - I just keep seeing "experts estimate..." which isn't me saying that it's invalid, it's just weird that I can't find it. The way they say they calculated it is very vague and can be interpreted in a lot of different ways:

apnews.com

Power of Moore tornado dwarfs Hiroshima bomb

WASHINGTON (AP) — Everything had to come together just perfectly to create the killer tornado in Moore, Okla.: wind speed, moisture in the air, temperature and timing.
apnews.com apnews.com
"Several meteorologists contacted by The Associated Press used real time measurements, some made by Schumacher, to calculate the energy released during the storm’s 40-minute life span. Their estimates ranged from 8 times to more than 600 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, with more experts at the high end. Their calculations were based on energy measured in the air and then multiplied over the size and duration of the storm." (Associated Press, Borenstein, 2013).

The highlighted part is weird to me - and I would need to see the calculation explicitly explained in a step-by-step because of how vague it is. For example, what types of energy were taken into account in this calculation (kinetic, electromagnetic, potential, etc.) I'm guessing as many as possible, but: How did you determine the "size" of the storm? Was it only the tornado, and if it was, where was the boundary specified? One thing I will note is that the range is absolutely enormous here, and I definitely do believe it released at least a couple atomic bombs' worth of energy with absolute certainty, considering its size, power, and duration. A paper on this would hopefully clear these questions up.

Another thing to note is that the calculation would have had to have been extremely imprecise, as taking into account the constantly changing characteristics of a tornadic vortex is simply not possible unless you make some extremely broad assumptions and model the tornado in an overly idealized way. Otherwise, even humanity's strongest supercomputer would take eons to attempt to calculate something that would probably fail in its prediction anyways. Of course, this can be reflected in the very wide range of energies presented by these articles (8x to 600x Hiroshima). However, I assumed that most of this energy was mechanical in some way, which on the surface seems realistic to me.

As for thermodynamics, you would be talking about statistical mechanics, which is by far my weakest branch of physics and I cannot comment on it in any strong capacity until I have read a textbook on it (I plan on reading up Thermal Physics by Blundell this summer to prep myself for grad school). I remain strongly skeptical on the role electromagnetism plays in the total energy output of a storm, as the 150,000 C of charge thing would imply that the majority of the energy released by Moore 2013 was electromagnetic if I am to take these Hiroshima calculations at face-value. I find that intuitively very hard to believe, but I honestly really just don't know. To give an example of why this number seems instantly erroneous to me, a lightning strike releases about 10-100 C of charge normally, so this would be three orders of magnitude above that purely in the electromagnetic department.

This is beyond a surface-level analysis and I would need to dig a good amount deeper to come to a more reasonable conclusion - I don't have time for that right now because I'm busy with UG studies and prepping for graduation right now. A lot of my inherent bias against this comes from electric universe cranks and people without an understanding of electromagnetism attempt to describe everything with it, and it simply doesn't work. There are a lot more people like that than you would expect, and they really annoy me. So forgive me if I come off as a little standoff-ish here, or if it sounds like I'm just writing off these claims, because I most certainly am not. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Click to expand...

Your comments are exactly the type of analysis I was looking for when I posted the study here, so I'm already satisfied with your explanations. No need to dig any deeper than you have. I know how much of a time suck this stuff can be and school is more important! lol

Admittedly, I've heard the nuclear bomb comparison for tornadoes so much over the years I just accepted it as fact without ever looking for any more proof. The article I sent now was just a quick google search.

I found the electromagnetic theory especially fascinating because I had just binge watched several of Leigh Orf's Youtube videos. For those that don't know, Orf is behind the most detailed tornado simulator in existence today. He's managed to recreate some historic tornadoes with unbelievable accuracy. Here's the 2011 El Reno tornado for example. The noodles shown here represent vorticity, and the color represents buoyancy (orange is warm air, blue is cold air)



However, he has also had loads of trouble getting the correct results with several other historic storms, especially fringe cases like the Pilger, NE twin EF4s. He's been missing a vital piece, and i'm wondering if electromagnetic forces is the answer. If anything, his simulation proves strong tornadoes can form from thermodynamic interactions alone, and electromagnetic forces are just another variable. The electromagnetic theory fits nicely within his observations, and could just be the missing piece required to create the physical conditions he's been unable to up to this point. It's almost like it's the "glue" that holds tornadoes together, when thermodynamic physics say they should fall apart.
 
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Pretty impressive little cell cluster over northern GA, per 12Z HRRR for late Thursday. They'll have plenty of instability to work with well into the evening, and an MCS is expected to form over MS/AL later. Don't think tornadoes will be much of an issue, although, interestingly, the NAM 3km has more helicity over the area Thursday night and depicts a mixed mode that would theoretically be capable of all hazards.
1744218722690.png1744218732543.png1744218737111.png1744218770129.png1744218807796.png1744218840139.png
 
Latest for tomorrow's lower-end threat from the WRF-ARW model I have. It is 2km high resolution and centered on Birmingham, AL. So far, it seems the 2km version of my model does its best work 12-48 hours in advance, so this would fall inside that sweet spot, therefore hoping this forecast is a good one. Let's dig in!


At 2 PM CDT Thursday, no threats yet, just scattered rain showers/thunderstorms.

com_radar_2PM.png


At the 4 PM CDT hour, a cluster of intense cells (looking the be start of a complex) has formed in western TN, and a minor tornado and hail threat exists in northern TN as well.
com_radar_4PM.png



At 5 PM CDT, there are several hail cores throughout TN, as well as several spots of rotation developing. The one Moderate area, with 237 UH, is somewhat high localized UH, and supports the idea of a localized tornado threat.

com_radar_5PM.png



At 6 PM, the high wind threat hasn't manifest just yet, but plenty of spots that could see Hail and a few isolated tornadoes.

com_radar_6PM.png


At 7 PM CDT, a wind threat is starting to appear, as well as increasing Hail threat. The tornado threat remains as well. The line is starting to move into MS, AL, and GA at this time.

com_radar_7PM.png


Same story through the 10 PM CDT hour. At this hour, the main threats are limited, but Hail and isolated tornadoes seem to be the biggest.

com_radar_10PM.png


By 1 AM (the end of this model run), the threat has subsided for the time being, as the brunt of the squall line pushes eastward into eastern GA and the Carolinas.
com_radar_1AM.png


Since this is primarily a wind-driven threat by the SPC and wind wasn't picked up much on this threat algorithm, I'm also showing the GIF of wind gusts across the area. It keeps most of the winds sub-severe, except inside a couple of cells, where it clocks gusts between 60-70 mph.


wind_gusts.gif




Overall, I'd say if this model verifies, they could easily up the tornado risk to 5%. The other threats are pretty dialed in, but my model isn't picking up on the Wind as a threat (so maybe it should be decreased as a threat some, if this model is correct).
 
wx_guy said:
Latest for tomorrow's lower-end threat from the WRF-ARW model I have. It is 2km high resolution and centered on Birmingham, AL. So far, it seems the 2km version of my model does its best work 12-48 hours in advance, so this would fall inside that sweet spot, therefore hoping this forecast is a good one. Let's dig in!


At 2 PM CDT Thursday, no threats yet, just scattered rain showers/thunderstorms.

View attachment 39538


At the 4 PM CDT hour, a cluster of intense cells (looking the be start of a complex) has formed in western TN, and a minor tornado and hail threat exists in northern TN as well.
View attachment 39539



At 5 PM CDT, there are several hail cores throughout TN, as well as several spots of rotation developing. The one Moderate area, with 237 UH, is somewhat high localized UH, and supports the idea of a localized tornado threat.

View attachment 39540



At 6 PM, the high wind threat hasn't manifest just yet, but plenty of spots that could see Hail and a few isolated tornadoes.

View attachment 39541


At 7 PM CDT, a wind threat is starting to appear, as well as increasing Hail threat. The tornado threat remains as well. The line is starting to move into MS, AL, and GA at this time.

View attachment 39542


Same story through the 10 PM CDT hour. At this hour, the main threats are limited, but Hail and isolated tornadoes seem to be the biggest.

View attachment 39543


By 1 AM (the end of this model run), the threat has subsided for the time being, as the brunt of the squall line pushes eastward into eastern GA and the Carolinas.
View attachment 39544


Since this is primarily a wind-driven threat by the SPC and wind wasn't picked up much on this threat algorithm, I'm also showing the GIF of wind gusts across the area. It keeps most of the winds sub-severe, except inside a couple of cells, where it clocks gusts between 60-70 mph.


View attachment 39545




Overall, I'd say if this model verifies, they could easily up the tornado risk to 5%. The other threats are pretty dialed in, but my model isn't picking up on the Wind as a threat (so maybe it should be decreased as a threat some, if this model is correct).
Click to expand...
Your model likes the spin up potential!
 
slenker said:
I’m highly skeptical of this idea, despite the plethora of sources being shown. After reading some bits and pieces of the abstracts and references here, I’m seeing some numbers that are just absurd.

Small nitpick with your post: Amperes is the measure of current, not charge. But to someone who doesn’t have a background in physics, it’s understandable to get a lot of this mixed up.

This paper that I cannot fully access due to being behind what I believe to be a paywall has an abstract that states that tornadoes are responsible for about 135,000 coulombs of charge transfer. If you know anything about EM, this number seems unbelievably ludicrous, and to me seems inconsistent with the idea that there’s a current of ~225 amps running through a tornado. Now unfortunately, I cannot see the rest of the paper, so there’s no way I can safely assume they reached these numbers in an irrational or rational way, but I’m disliking this already, to say the least.

This number is ridiculous though. For example, if you somehow managed to freeze time and teleport 1 C of pure charge just sitting out in the open, it’s about on the order of 10^19 electrons sitting in a single spot undisturbed. If you then turned time on, that 1 C would seek to neutralize itself with over 5 billion joules of energy. That’s a bigger explosion than one ton of TNT.

This paper shows mathematics and a strong foundation for how to get a very rough idea of what the magnetic field in a tornado would potentially look like. There’s a huge issue though: In the conclusions section, it states that the calculated magnetic field would be on the order of ~0.2-2 T (Tesla). This is a very strong magnetic field. It’s comparable to MRI machines. If this occurred I feel like anyone going through a tornado, even in a basement, with anything metal on them whatsoever would become minced meat in a far more gruesome way than even an EF5 could do. But forget that: why have we never heard of ferromagnetic objects being attracted to the center of a tornadic vortex? This to me is the ultimate reason why I can’t see this being a possibility. I could be wrong, but there’s a lot here that just doesn’t seem to add up.

Seeing as there’s a plethora of resources to read here about the subject, I don’t want to call crock on it. In fact, there’s probably some legitimacy to it that I’m not seeing, not yet at least. I need to dig deeper. The reason why I’m so invested in this is because I do have a background in physics and this idea just screams crackpot to me despite there being actual papers on it. It just sounds like the electric universe people who believe gravity doesn’t exist when they try and fail to apply electrodynamics to every single situation, on the surface at least.
Click to expand...
Wait just a moment here: 225 amps of electricity is well enough to weld metal with; in fact with a direct current, and depending on what you're using, thats enough to melt straight through a quarter inch plate of steel.

EDIT: I will add I weld using a stick welder; the typical amperage im using for lets say a 7018 rod is about 115 amps. For a 6013 rod im using 85 amps. 225 is FAR FAR above that. I use direct current

Can I weld using a tornado??? Sure im half kidding; but that goes to show how cookey this idea kinda is.
The ONLY tornado I can say might have had something distinctly "electric" going on is the Blackwell F5. Which I suspect the "glow' this tornado had was actually rooted in quartz based triboluminescence; combined with a large amount of friction from a tornado with a high degree of vertical motion.
 
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NewFoundWeatherNerd said:
Wait just a moment here: 225 amps of electricity is well enough to weld metal with; in fact with a direct current, and depending on what you're using, thats enough to melt straight through a quarter inch plate of steel.

EDIT: I will add I weld using a stick welder; the typical amperage im using for lets say a 7018 rod is about 115 amps. For a 6013 rod im using 85 amps. 225 is FAR FAR above that. I use direct current

Can I weld using a tornado??? Sure im half kidding; but that goes to show how cookey this idea kinda is.
The ONLY tornado I can say might have had something distinctly "electric" going on is the Blackwell F5. Which I suspect the "glow' this tornado had was actually rooted in quartz based triboluminescence; combined with a large amount of friction from a tornado with a high degree of vertical motion.
Click to expand...
One factor worth mentioning is that a tornadic vortex is obviously orders of magnitude larger in cross-sectional area than a wire or anything used in welding would be, so I feel like it’s still not completely outlandish when you look at it from that perspective. But a lot of the other numbers are still wonky to me and it just seems like a very strange idea in general.
 
Both 18Z NAM and HRRR are a bit concerning, each showing discrete supercell activity over the northern portions of Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi on Thursday afternoon into the evening. Again, wouldn't necessarily foresee tornadoes as a substantial risk, but from an overall perspective, tomorrow certainly has the opportunity to be sneakily impressive for some of us.
CODNEXLAB-FORECAST-2025040918-HRRR-SE-prec-radar-26-36-100.gifCODNEXLAB-FORECAST-2025040918-NAMNST-SE-prec-radar-26-36-100.gif
 
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