Seymour, America

Small towns get a bad rap sometimes.  The cliche is that they’re boring and backward, lacking culture, diversity, opportunity, and other hallmarks of the modern lifestyle.   In my opinion, it’s a grave mistake to write off the rural half of America like this: it seems to me that every small town has its own complicated dynamics and fascinating personalities.  I keep finding myself in Seymour, Missouri, a town of around 2000 people in the heart of Amish country.  When you’re driving through, all you see are two traffic lights and a few metal-sided buildings for commerce.  But if you stop and get acquainted with the locals, ooh boy… in just a few weeks (between 8 and 5 only, mind you), I’ve accumulated a collection of vignettes that barely scratches the surface of the community.

When on the job, Russel and I frequent a machine shop in Seymour to work on various invention and fabrication projects.  The guys who work in the shop range from age 18 to over 60, all lifers to that county.  All skilled in multiple aspects of metal fabrication (welding, cutting, drilling, milling, sandblasting, painting) that I didn’t know the first thing about on my first visit 6 years ago.  The pay is barely above the federal minimum wage, which seems low for the sheer amount of equipment they produce for their hefty military contracts.  But it’s stable, good work, and the guys take pride in their craft.  Joe and Justin saved up for a year to take a trip to the Dominican Republic. Gerald recently won $100k in the lottery and used it to buy a larger property for his modular home. Justin’s dad Bobby hilariously grumbles about everything, but he’s so helpful he’d give you the shirt off his back. They collectively vent about the lazy new employee. They pick on the high school intern – a good kid and skilled machinist who was preparing for technical college. (Edit: neither of these people work there anymore, for better or worse.) The owner Rick sets the tone, balancing respectful leadership with occasional pranks for levity. Russel regards him and Bobby as family: all in all, they’re unwaveringly supportive of their kin, a theme in rural American culture.

Venturing out, the cast of characters becomes more eclectic.  Russel’s two brothers live in town: Mike runs a competing machine shop a stone’s throw away.  A foil of Russel, Mike painstakingly designs his equipment builds in multiple CAD programs, then uses one of several CNC machines in his pristine workshop to cut everything to size and weld parts together by the book.  A libertarian to the core, he has amassed tools and equipment solely to avoid paying taxes on profits (though, ironically, he has persistently petitioned the city to condemn the beekeeper next door).  Russel’s other brother Gabe currently drives a cement mixer and is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.  His house in town belongs in a movie, towering and irregular like a child’s block fort, sided with shiny aluminum sheets, his yard gradually paved over with extra concrete from work.  Last fall, he had to pour a slab for a local nudist ranch called Cactus Canyon, a story I have to withhold because the exchange was…prickly.

I mentioned this is Amish country, which adds a very interesting cultural dynamic to Seymour.  The Amish live outside of town in a few enclaves, driving their horse-drawn wagons at a quick trot into town.  One place we always encounter Amish is the farm supply/hardware store: they are incredibly polite, greeting you briefly with a hint of Germanic accent (at home, they speak a rare Swiss dialect and refer to us as “the English”).  The Amish kids will stare at you silently, like children of the corn.  Acknowledging a need to diversify the gene pool as their population dwindled, they have matchmaking exchanges with another Swiss Amish enclave in Indiana – consequently, the community has grown substantially since the 60s, according to census data.  While I have not had much direct interaction with the Amish, I have heard numerous stories of their shrewd business dealings, heretical extramarital affairs, and incredible toughness in manual labor…fascinating folks.

A couple more profiles: Eric is another Seymour lifer who owns and operates a roadside barbecue stand.  That is the only normal thing about him, however, as I found out when I went around back where he used to keep his bears. Yep, black bears that he raised from cubs.  The two times we stopped at his stand he showed us incredible videos on his smartphone: this week, a tornado reaching down fingers of condensation viewed from a few hundred yards away.  The first time it was an orb of light that hovered in place for several seconds then took off with a sonic boom.  Locals were split whether it was a secret military exercise or a UFO, unidentifiable from the typical grainy footage taken at twilight.  Brandon, owner of the local offroading ranch and extreme fireworks enthusiast, insisted that the mysterious light was part of an elaborate military/government conspiracy “like how they faked the moon landings.”  Of course small towns like Seymour often have their share of hardships and public drama, and gossip is overwhelmingly pervasive and personal.  But I have thoroughly enjoyed experiencing Seymour, as an outsider with a front row seat to the town’s Pulitzer-worthy goings-on.  I hope to continue to intimately understand the communities where my travels take me, as I am eager to See More America!

Simulating Winds within a Tornado

TL;DR Check out this cool simulation of a multi-vortex tornado!  Or read more about it here.

An idealized, “high swirl” tornado: purple tubes represent isosurfaces of reduced barometric pressure, colormap shows 10-meter wind velocity in m/s. Source: George Bryan, NCAR

The above simulation was created using the VAPOR computational package, an open-source program developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.  The “high swirl” animation represents the condition of vortex breakdown, as excess vorticity leads to chaotic movements and dissipation of the funnel.  Dr. Bryan also created low and medium swirl animations to show idealized flows within other stages of a tornado’s lifespan. While these animations all use the same set of physical governing equations, there are many inherent flow deviations due to the turbulent nature of these air flows.  Hence the “idealized” descriptor: slight perturbations could cause significant deviations in vortex behavior.

Another challenge with simulating tornadoes is in visualization: a colleague of mine, Prof. Leigh Orf at the University of Wisconsin, has spent over 10 years creating his own simulation for tornadoes, with most of the time and effort going into developing realistic graphics to render wind and cloud motions.  The winds in a tornado are only visible by the debris or condensation that they carry, so an accurate cloud depiction can enable photogrammetric comparison with actual tornado footage.  Using the same governing equations and an updraft nudging technique to initiate convection, Dr. Orf was able to simulate a long-track wedge tornado and its parent thunderstorm from a set of atmospheric starting conditions.  His animations are both instructive and impressively photorealistic, definitely worth a look at orf.media!

Though we have known the math describing a tornado for nearly 50 years, the computational technology to run such simulations has only been accessible for the last decade.  Since this is not a new research field per sé, there are only a few lone wolves currently doing simulation work regarding tornadoes, even though the applications in forecasting and risk assessment are potentially great.  Then again, I met with Prof. David Lewellen at the University of West Virginia, who warned me that no simulation can ever be inclusive enough to be reliably predictive.  And he’s simulated tornado-like vortices for 30 years.  Nevertheless, I am still working on my boundary layer simulation in the hopes of combining it with a VAPOR3 vortex simulation.  While 100% certainty is virtually unattainable in meteorology, ensemble simulations undoubtedly carry value as an expression of likely scenarios and, in the case of my tornado updraft modeling research, an indicator of comparative tornado risk.  So I cycle on.

May 9th, 2003: a seminal moment

Actually, this story begins the day before.  Thursday, May 8th.  I was transfixed to the analog television in the living room: Gary England was delivering the weather radar play-by-play as supercell thunderstorms brewed west of the metro.  We had moved from Maine to Oklahoma City just over a year prior, and this was my first recollection of watching the TV broadcast during severe weather.  In Oklahoma City, everyone knows who Gary England is.  In fact, the chief meteorologists from all the local networks are household names, and it’s a fact of life that programming will be put on hold a few times every spring for an hours-long emergency weather broadcast.  As evening fell, the supercell strengthened and spawned a major tornado in the southern suburb of Moore.  I watched the helicopter footage in fearful awe as the EF5 tornado plowed through neighborhoods, churning up debris.  I traced the map as Gary England announced street intersections in the path of destruction.  I stayed tuned in throughout the evening as damage reports flowed in and another line of thunderstorms developed to the northwest.

It’s easy to miss the gravity of events as you watch them on live television, especially as a kid.  But the nearness and severity of the tornado struck home the next day, when poignant photographs of destroyed buildings (a few of which I recognized) headlined the morning news, along with reports of over 300 injuries.  The previous day’s tornado dominated the adult conversations at school, drawing comparisons to the “strongest tornado ever recorded” that tore an adjacent path through Moore in 1999.  This day was warm and windy, just like the one before, and I came home to another continuous severe weather broadcast.  The first round of severe thunderstorms missed us, and I went to bed around 8pm, emotionally drained (as an 11-year-old, this didn’t take much) but relieved that storms were weakening.

My parents woke me up a couple hours later, ushering me into the closet and jamming a bicycle helmet onto my head.  Bleary-eyed and delirious, I can remember the faint monotone of tornado sirens amidst the sounds of gusty wind and a crackly weather radio.  Though the radio commentary faded in and out, it was clearly established that a nocturnal tornado had done extensive damage in Nichols Hills, a neighborhood 10 miles directly upwind from us.  But beyond that, we didn’t really know what was going on.  Street names were called out sporadically, giving the impression that the tornado hovered over one unfortunate locale for minutes before jumping to a new target several miles over, zigging and zagging, bobbing and weaving.  Minutes after being told the tornado passed to our north, our nearest major intersection was mentioned as its momentary location.  We were hunkered down for a long 45 minutes before finally returning to bed.

The next morning, all of the previous night’s damage was brought to light.  Branches and insulation foam littered our yard.  The power was out for miles around.  Our house and neighborhood were intact, but the tornado tracked less than a mile to the north, ripping the roof from several houses near the golf course and reducing half of my elementary school to a twisted heap of sheet metal.  A Port-a-potty was thrown hundreds of yards to land face-down in the middle of the road.  We ate an uncharacteristic breakfast at the truck stop Waffle House then went to the grocery store; ice storm season was over, so we weren’t really prepared for a 2-day power outage.  School was canceled as staff salvaged classroom items from the wreckage and a chain-link fence was erected around the old building.  When it resumed a few days later, the displaced classes (pre-K through 2nd grade) sat in little circles in the cafeteria.  My 5th grade class had a calming discussion to relieve any PTSD, and further counseling was available for students who were directly affected.  The effects of the tornado on Oakdale School were profound and long-lasting: for my last 3 years at the school, portable classrooms were a fixture, housing my middle school band and 7th grade science classes.  Since then, an aggressive rebuilding and expansion plan has grown the school by around 300%, and only the front is recognizable from my time, way back when.

Perhaps more importantly, this incident sparked in me a balance of fear and curiosity about tornadoes.  I didn’t know it at the time, but these experiences would unknowingly set off a chain of events that led me to where I am now, studying why tornadoes take the paths that they do.

The wreckage of Oakdale School, taken the night of the tornado (AP)