Using Military Technology in Tornado Research
// September 23rd, 2008 // No Comments » // random, tech
So, I had a thought while trying to fall asleep the other day. If you’ve ever watched the movie Twister, you’d know that they were trying to gather data on tornadoes by dropping a delivery device in the path of a tornado and hoping it would hit it to lift sensors up into the body of the tornado to gain some insight on how it works.
So, here’s my thought: Why not use some military technology to make it a bit easier? If the military has the ability to hit a specific window of a building with a smart bomb, why can’t we use that same principle to get close enough to a tornado to drop a payload into it? And not just a bomb, how about modify one of those cluster bombs to drop hundreds of the probes into a tornado.
Get someone on the ground with a laser targeting device and point it at the tornado (hoping that the debris would provide enough reflectivity to get a signal), while simultaneously using GPS to track it. Get some kind of aircraft to fly over the storm, drop the bomb into the storm at the targeted tornado. Do this, and before the bomb hits (50ft or so above ground) have it detonate and spread the sensors into the storm.
Might be a little safer than running into the path of a storm, dropping something in it’s path, and trying to make it out of the way before you get creamed by the tornado.
I wasn’t really going anywhere with this, just writing down my random thoughts.
