Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/21/dont-get-this-close-to-a-tor.html
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Ah, I get it: along with the post about Dutch guys fishing landmines out of ponds with magnets I’m guessing it’s Darwin Awards nomination night?
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Well, good camera work anyway. So surreal to be able to see it that well.
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So…was there a driver with that semi trailer?
Spectacular and awesome phenomena etc. etc. but I freely confess I watch these things because I’m waiting for judgement to be rewarded.
Spoiler: judgement was not rewarded. This time.
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Is an Outback tornado an Aussie colloquialism for huge damn dust devil, or what? As an old Jayhawker it doesn’t seem to me that a dust devil can have 1/1000 the impact of a low plains twister!
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These are fun too…
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Absolutely spectacular footage! I found my mouth was hanging open at the end of it. Not going to vouch for whether that was a particularly intelligent or safe thing to do, but fantastic.
I think that was just an empty flatbed – used for transporting hay bails – parked along the side of a field. But the fact that it was now parked in the middle of the road says a lot.
That was a fantastic dust devil. A real monster. Those things can be very dangerous too.
I’m always surprised hearing about tornadoes where tornadoes usually don’t appear. I think they prefer a very large flat open space giving the thunderstorm cell time to develop both in height and vorticity. The thunderstorm itself requires a copious flow of warm mois … sorry… water vapor laden air, and some mechanism of uplift – convection and weather fronts and mountain ranges etc.
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The end of the article upthread mentions that this why US tornadoes tend to be bigger, due to the Gulf of Mexico and the Rocky Mountains’ proximity to each other.
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From the article I linked above, it sounds like they’re a lot less common in the outback, but they do have them.
Incidentally, can you please correct the quote attribution? It was @seedroller who typed that, not me.
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Thanks for the education, Gulliver. I know that as the climate heats up, weather is getting more violent around the world. I wasn’t aware of tornadoes in Australia. But still, the video you posted seemed to show a dust devil, known to most of us in the western US as a harmless phenomena. The vid explaining tornadoes in Australia showed powerful low pressure storm systems colliding with cold fronts. Call me Dorothy, but Kansans know tornadoes.
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Ever been close to one? I’ve lived in Wichita off and on for almost 30 years but I’ve never been less than 10 miles away from one.
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Actually, I was taking about the tipped-over trailer and debris that looked like a former vehicle about halfway through. Wondered about the flatbed too…
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Having seen the aftermath of tornadoes, I think they were connected.
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And here I was wondering why I shouldn’t get close to a tomato.
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Yes, a dozen at least, and I’m no chaser. I watched the F5 that destroyed Andover KS in April ‘91 from the balcony of a crappy SE Wichita motel near McConnell AFB. Watched it coming in as it skirted between the AFB and our motel less than a mile away, took cover for a minute, then came back out to watch it tear hell out of Andover. My job involved an annual 3 week Spring tour through Kansas, and I got uncomfortably close to a few. The closest encounter, though, was very near my home in Kansas City. Driving my family home from MCI airport on May 4, 2003 we saw a big twister a couple miles ahead of us as we crossed the Missouri River on I-435. More sensible folks were pulling off to the shoulder, but I kept going through the sheets of rain, trying to tell my screaming wife & kids that we would be alright. I could see that the tornado was headed for my neighborhood, and we got home to see that it had destroyed around 60 houses within 1/2 mile of ours. Everything close to our house was wrecked, but not ours. It was horrible to see, but fortunately only 2 people were killed. It was a learning experience for my daughters to go straight from Disney World to this homecoming.
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Now I want to watch Twister again …
That tornadoes don’t happen in cities and mountains is a myth. There is just much less land occupied by cities than rural areas. Fort Worth, SLC, Lubbock, and London have all been hit. Yellowstone NP had a tornado at 10,000 ft elevation, and there was one in the Northern Colorado mountains at 9,000 feet. It’s not the terrain that matters, it’s where the atmospheric conditions are favorable. That just happens to be the central plains of the US.
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might have helped the report if he had kept the camera on a fixed view… just saying
