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Researchers Simulate Monster EF5 Tornado
New submitter Orp writes: I am the member of a research team that created a supercell thunderstorm simulation that is getting a lot of attention. Presented at the 27th Annual Severe Local Storms Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, Leigh Orf's talk was produced entirely as high def video and put on YouTube shortly after the presentation. In the simulation, the storm's updraft is so strong that it essentially peels rain-cooled air near the surface upward and into the storm's updraft, which appears to play a key role in maintaining the tornado. The simulation was based upon the environment that produced the May 24, 2011 outbreak which included a long-track EF5 tornado near El Reno Oklahoma (not to be confused with the May 31, 2013 EF5 tornado that killed three storm researchers).
What's the bet Cray doesn't get a mention in this thread? Oh wait ...
There it goes.
It's Saturday night, I've got one in my sleeping bag right now.
This is pretty amazing. I've heard the theory before that tornadoes are formed from that same baroclinic horizontal vortex tilting upwards, but the mechanism for that has never made a whole lot of sense to me. The idea of it getting pulled up into the actual mesocyclone itself and powering it so that the tornado can form makes a lot more sense. It also makes it a lot more clear what role the RFD has in tornadogenesis. And that parade of vortices, I'd never heard of that before.
Hopefully this will help the weather people start to see clues that a tornado is trying to form even before the hook starts to become obvious on radar.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Look at that hook!
"No, but understanding is not required, only obedience."
That was a very well done presentation even if it was so far over my head that I understood little but, "oooh, pretty".
The pacing was fast, confident, and even had the audience laughing at times. Congratulations.
Now I feel an evil urge to make a joke about how, since your model didn't properly account for "hydrometeor centrifigal whatzits" then it is therefore worthless and you, Mr Orf, like those climate researchers, are in it for the big bucks in grant money to fund your lavish Toyotas and suburban middle class homes.
Or something. I've likely failed at humour. But you've succeeded in your research, kudos.
Is there any other kind of EF5?
was any mention of Dorothy.
I don't see the smashed up trailer parks in those pictures.
Did the researchers use gold plated monster cables to create this moster EF5 tornado?
You mean IBM. Yes it true Slashdot always suppresses any positive news about IBM, and its Power architecture. It has to do with the NeoCons investors owning a large percentage of intel stock, cray stock, dice holding stock, and the the whole x86 supply chain.
LOL. Yes Bluewaters could have been a great IBM computer if it wasn't a Cray.
What computing system was used to render the video, and is there a paper available which describes some of the math behind the simulation?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I think the individual with the last name of Orf should change that name to Ork...in honor of Lord of the Rings
I wanted to give some info on the technical aspect of getting this to work that might be appreciated by slashdotters.
You can read about the Blue Waters hardware profile here. Our simulation "only" utilized 20,000 of the approximately 700,000 processing cores on the machine. Blue Waters, like all major supercomputers, runs a Linux kernel tuned for HPC.
The cloud model, CM1, is a hybrid MPI/OpenMP model. Blue Waters has 16 cores (or 32 depending on how you look at it) per node. We have 16 MPI processes going and each MPI rank can access two OpenMP threads. Our decomposition is nothing special, and it works well enough at the scales we are running at.
The simulation produced on the order of 100 TB of raw data. It is easy to produce a lot of data with these simulations - data is saved as 3D floating point arrays and only compresses roughly 2:1 in aggregate form (some types of data compress better than others). I/O is a significant bottleneck for these types of simulations when you save data very frequently, which is necessary for these detailed simulations, and I've spent years working on getting I/O to work sufficiently well so that this kind of simulation and visualization was possible.
The CM1 model is written in Fortran 90/95. The code I wrote to get all the I/O and visualization stuff to work is a combination of C, C++, and Python. The model's raw output format is HDF5, and files are scattered about in a logical way, and I've written a set of tools to interface with the data in a way that greatly simplifies things through an API that accesses the data at a low level but does not require the user to do anything but request data bounded by Cartesian coordinates.
I would have to say the biggest challenge wasn't technical (and the technical challenges are significant), but was physical: Getting a storm to produce one of these types of tornadoes. They are very rare in nature, and this behavior is mirrored in the numerical world. We hope to model more of these so we can draw more general conclusions; a single simulation is compelling, but with sensitivity studies etc. you can really start to do some neat things.
We are now working on publishing the work, which seems to have "passed the sniff test" at the Severe Local Storms conference. It's exciting, and we look forward to really teasing apart some of these interesting processes that show up in the visualizations.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
Power arch runs hot and is slow. Alpha was better. Know who bought the Alpha designs and hired the Alpha engineers when DEC folded? Intel.
Bruce Lee?
Not yet incorporated into the model if I understood the talk correctly.
This will be interesting to see when the ground is modeled. At some point, ground features (hils, valleys,etc.) may affect the growth and trajectory of a tornado. And it would be interesting to see if such models can provide a damage risk profile with respect to these features.
So I'll know where not to park my mobile home.
Have gnu, will travel.
I've read that if you're outside and a tornado is coming your way, you should not be in a car. The tornado could pick up the car a few stories high, and then drop the car.
Is that right?
You guys should contact Peter Thiel's Breakout Laboratories that funded a just-completed study of a physical model of a tornado with the potential of generating electricity -- baseload electricity at that -- from ambient heat.
Here are the most recent photographs and short video of that scale model which, at full scale, would be called an Atmospheric Vortex Engine.
Seastead this.
You mean stole as part of a settlement after getting busted infringing on over 20 DEC patents.