Whether you're along the seacoast or in the middle of the U.S. Great Plains, there are few things more terrifying than really, really bad weather. Anyone who's experienced a hurricane such as Katrina in 2005 or Sandy in 2012 can testify to their destructive fury. While flooding is a serious problem, the most immediate threat from hurricanes is their powerful winds, which in a worst-case scenario can attain speeds of more than 150 miles (241 kilometers) per hour -- enough to snap trees like twigs, knock down utility poles, rip off roofs and demolish house walls. A tornado that ravaged the town of Joplin, Mo. But if there's a silver lining to those ominous dark clouds, it's that technology may help us to better withstand the destructive ravages of powerful winds. Here are a few of the most useful ways in which technology can save people from storms. To understand how storms work and to anticipate their behavior, meteorologists turned to a new forecasting tool in recent years: powerful supercomputers that create sophisticated virtual models of hurricane seasons.
Before the summer hurricane season begins, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) now amass a vast amount of data from weather satellites and input it into a supercomputer at the Climate Prediction Center in Gaithersburg, Md. Government weather forecasters are so convinced of the value of such modeling that they recently upgraded their supercomputers to be able to perform an astonishing 213 trillion calculations per second (about 200,000 times the speed of an iPad), and store 2,000 terabytes of data -- roughly the equivalent of 2 billion digital photos. All that power has already improved the accuracy of their weather forecasting by 15 percent. The result is that people in hurricane-prone areas get a little more lead time to make preparations and evacuate. Tornadoes are a scary threat -- not just because they kill hundreds of people in the U.S. But National Weather Service forecasters are now using a technological advance that they hope will enable them to better predict where tornadoes are headed.
The service's existing NEXTRAD radar system has long relied upon 150 massive radar antennas spread across the country, which sit on dedicated towers several stories high, and track storms that are more than 100 miles (162 kilometers) away. But the old system has limitations. Because the pulses of electromagnetic radiation that the antennas send out travel in straight lines, the Earth tends to block their view of anything that's far away and also close to the ground. That works out to a blind spot that covers about 75 percent of the atmosphere below 1 kilometer (0.62 of a mile) in altitude, which is where a lot of weather occurs. In a 2011 test, researchers found that CASA helped them to see that a tornado in the Chickasha, iphone 8 back glass replacement cost Okla. During a powerful storm, one of the biggest risks is having the roof ripped off your house. The powerful winds blowing over your home will exert inward pressure against the far wall that's downwind, push outward against the opposite wall and the side walls, and push the roof upward.
If your roof beams aren't strongly connected, the roof will lift off, leaving your house's walls without any lateral stability or bracing. This happens a lot, particularly when tornadoes strike. Outside of hurricane zones, most building codes only call for roof trusses to be connected to the top of exterior walls with 3.5 inch (9 centimeter) nails. Those connections are enough to withstand brief gusts of wind at speeds of up to 90 miles (145 kilometers) an hour. These strengthen the roof so it can withstand battering by 110-mile-an-hour (177 kilometer-an-hour) winds. Even if your house isn't knocked down by a powerful storm, your front entrance can take a real beating. That's not a good thing, especially if you're hoping to remain safe from the weather and also from looters who sometimes take advantage of a weather disaster. Texas Tech's Wind Science and Research Center actually tests doors for storm resistance, using a giant air bladder that simulates up to the force of an EF5 tornado, the most powerful twister around.
Such doors are notoriously flimsy, and if yours fails during a tornado, you'll get a lot of internal pressure inside your house that potentially could blow out your walls and ceilings. Protect against this by picking a good stiff garage door, and hiring a technician to add weights to the door's counterbalance system. Even if your roof and doors don't give way in a tornado or hurricane, powerful winds are going to push against your walls directly -- and possibly slam big pieces of debris into them at 200 miles (321 kilometers) per hour. So if you want a storm-resistant house, you've got to have tough walls as well. Try to imagine really big, tough Lego blocks, and you'll get the general idea. Once the building blocks are set, a steel framework is put in to for reinforcement, and concrete is poured into the plastic forms. There's an old myth that opening your windows during a tornado or hurricane will equalize the pressure inside and outside the home, allowing the storm to pass through your house without destroying it.
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