Wherever you live on the planet, weather shapes your world. Yet for most of us, how it works
is a mystery. So I'm going to strip weather back to basics.
Uncovering it's secrets in a series of brave, ambitious, and sometimes just plain unlikely experiments.
To show you weather like you've never seen it before.
Tornadoes are the most powerful winds on Earth. They move far faster than a normal wind.
Not in a straight line, but in the speed that they can spin. And it's that spin that does the damage
Look at it this way: If I am spinning this
bucket around my head, it's not how fast I am walking towards you that dictates how hard
it will hit you when I get there. Even if I walk really quickly that speed's irrelevant,
it is how fast I am spinning the bucket that matters and what's in it to add to the weight.
And that is how it is with a tornado. Debris does most of the damage, that's the weight
in the bucket the most destructive force of the tornado itself is its spin, its rotational
speed. Which is why it's remarkable that's the part of the tornado we know least about.
To try and put that right I'm visiting the
distinctly un-tornado-like landscape of Ontario in Canada - and one remarkable building.
I'm going to do something a person wouldn't normally do. I'm going in.
I'm in! This is it! I'm in the eye of it and... all I can say is ...yes! This feels as amazing as I
suspect it looks. I am in a tornado, it is the most astonishing feeling, it's dizzying.
The world is roaring past and spinning round me but I am still. This is massively scaled
down of course. A real one would be, maybe one hundred times bigger and the wind moving
maybe four or five time faster but never the less you get a sense of the relentless terrifying
power of one of these things in the wild. This is the Wind Engineering, Energy and Environment
Research Institute- or WindEEE for short. And it's the only place on the planet capable
of duplicating the real life dynamics of a tornado.It does it by using one hundred and
six giant fans hidden behind the walls and ceiling of the world's first hexagonal wind
tunnel. The whole structure cost twenty-three million dollars. Which makes it all the more
delicate asking it's boss, Professor Horia Hangan, for a little favour.
Just while we're here, I'd really like to just have a little look at velocities sort
of that way in tornadoes. Can we experiment a bit with it?
Do you mind if we make a bit of a mess?
Not a massive mess. There might be. We'll sweep up. You won't know we've been here,
everything will be gone.
That's fine we can do a little bit of a mess here, so we are prepared to catch some stuff
that you throw in to it so.
It might happen.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Good for him. He's trusting us with his twenty-three million dollar baby. Right. Plan. I want to
look more in to velocity - see how fast the wind is moving - and if I introduce these
ping pong balls in to our tornado I can measure the speed. I'm going to feed them to it.
We think of tornadoes as sucking up everything in their path, turns out it's not that easy.
I retreat to the control room where the Professor and I spend the next four hours trying to
get something, anything, to actually fly inside the tornado.
With no luck. Then one of the scientists finds these pink
foam squares. Which might just be light enough to do the
trick. If we can get those foam squares trapped in
the tornado and if we can get them lifted up and spun round without being spat out then
we might be able to time how long it takes one to do a full lap.
We're going to start the fans.
You see?
There it is! Looking good. Yeah.
Normally it's impossible to judge a tornado's speed near the ground because of all the debris
and objects in the way. But here we have a real chance. Time to turn
on the tracking technology.
The computer follows individual squares, one after another, so it can create an average speed from the
different trajectories. And it works! According to the computer it's spinning
at a shade over 22 miles an hour.
A real tornado could be ten times faster than that, but this is still the first time any
tornado has been measured this near the ground. If we could find a way to do this in the wild,
then we might change our understanding of tornadoes forever.