Tracking Tornado's on the Ground in Real Time

By Phil Bording

Bad weather sometimes turns into tornados and bad things happen.  The Joplin Tornado hit a hospital full force.   Weather RADAR shows the tornado but does not always indicate if it is on the ground.  In this talk, I work on the idea of using the ground shaking from a tornado and the seismic waves to track the tornado. How much energy is put into the ground from a twisting tree or a building as a 100-foot-wide wind wall full of debris of a tornado passes through or by? What energy form is generated, shear waves, compression waves, Rayleigh Waves? A study of frequency content, ground motion, and energy forces for these moving sources are needed to identify tornado data at multiple seismic sensor locations.

Computer simulation using an elastic wave modeling solver and movies illustrate how this might or might not work....

We will gather at 11:30 go get lunches ordered and tune into the talk at noon.