{"id":64285,"date":"2008-12-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-30T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/when-not-studying-hurricanes-uri-doctoral-student-chases-tornadoes-for-fun\/"},"modified":"2008-12-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-30T00:00:00","slug":"when-not-studying-hurricanes-uri-doctoral-student-chases-tornadoes-for-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2008\/12\/when-not-studying-hurricanes-uri-doctoral-student-chases-tornadoes-for-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"When not studying hurricanes, 溏心vlog免费B站 doctoral student chases tornadoes for fun"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tLincoln resident turning big storms into career, hobby<\/p>\n


\n\tNARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 December 30, 2008 \u2013 As a child, Richard Yablonsky took an unusually serious interest in astronomy, meteorology, and natural disasters, consuming every bit of information he could about the subjects and even convincing his parents to take family vacations to places where he could learn more.<\/p>\n


\n\tHis interest hasn\u2019t waned. As a doctoral student at the 溏心vlog免费B站, Yablonsky is making important discoveries about hurricane intensity. And during his free time, he travels to the Midwest to pursue his favorite hobby \u2013 tornado chasing.<\/p>\n


\n\tA native of Durham, N.C. who now lives in Lincoln, R.I., Yablonsky enrolled at 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Graduate School of Oceanography in 2004 to study with Isaac Ginis, one of the world\u2019s leading experts on the role the ocean plays in intensifying hurricanes.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cMy research deals with subsurface ocean temperature features and how those features can feed back to the hurricane\u2019s intensity,\u201d explained the Lincoln, R.I. resident. \u201cUntil recently, it was assumed that only the sea surface temperature ahead of a hurricane is important for predicting the future intensity change of the storm. Meteorologists were reluctant to look below the surface. But because hurricanes mix the ocean, the subsurface temperature is important, too.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tYablonsky is examining the effect of warm ocean eddies \u2013 ring-shaped ocean currents with warmer water inside the ring than outside it — on hurricane intensity. He said that when a warm ocean eddy is located on the left side of a storm track, the eddy pushes cold water from the hurricane\u2019s wake further behind the storm, allowing the storm to continually pass over warm water and subsequently intensify. If the eddy is on the right side of a storm track, however, cold water from the hurricane\u2019s wake is pushed ahead of the storm, limiting the storm\u2019s intensity.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe part about a warm ocean eddy on the right side of the storm track limiting storm intensity is new and exciting because it was totally unexpected when I began looking at it,\u201d Yablonsky said.<\/p>\n


\n\tRegardless of the status of his research or anything else happening in his life, whenever Memorial Day comes around, Yablonsky and his wife, Tracy McCormick, drop everything and fly to Kansas City to pursue their passion for chasing tornadoes.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cEver since high school, I\u2019ve been fascinated by tornadoes,\u201d Yablonsky said. \u201cMy parents got me tornado videos, we went to see the movie Twister, and I always dreamed of tornado chasing. During a summer internship in 2000 in Norman, Okla., where I met my wife, we did our first storm chasing, but we didn\u2019t see much.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tA week-long storm chasing experience in 2002 ignited his passion, and since 2005, Yablonsky, McCormick — who works for the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass. — and a few of their friends have chased storms for a week or two each May, a month that he calls \u201cthe climatological tornado peak in the Midwest.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cWe fly into Kansas City, rent a car, connect our laptops to the Internet, and make a series of forecasts,\u201d he explained. \u201cWe look at computer model data to find our target location, and then we start looking at real-time weather data and radar. We just go wherever the storms are most likely to be.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tAlthough the tornado chasers didn\u2019t find any tornadoes in 2005 or 2006, they hit the jackpot in 2008, seeing two tornadoes on their first day, including a half-mile wide \u201cwedge tornado\u201d near Quinter, Kansas that Yablonsky described as \u201ca monster, by far the largest and most powerful tornado we\u2019ve seen.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tTheir scariest moment occurred on May 26 when they concluded that meteorological conditions weren\u2019t favorable for tornadoes and so they weren\u2019t paying as much attention as they should have been.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cA rotating wall cloud and possible funnel cloud ended up over our heads, and we had to take cover in the back kitchen of a McDonald\u2019s in Pratt, Kansas as tornado sirens sounded in the town. The manager of the McDonald\u2019s huddled everyone in back, and we waited it out. A tornado was reported a couple of miles from us, so that circulation over our heads probably touched down nearby.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tWhile Yablonsky said that experience scared him enough to want to take a couple of years off from tornado chasing, his wife doesn\u2019t want to stop. <\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cI have a love-hate relationship with tornadoes,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m equally excited by them as I am afraid of them. It\u2019s a rush, it\u2019s a thrill, and it\u2019s a bit of an adrenaline thing.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tBut tornado chasing isn\u2019t just a hobby to Yablonsky and McCormick. <\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cWhen appropriate, we call in to the National Weather Service to report what we see and to help them issue or verify warnings. In that way, we\u2019re contributing to the safety of the residents threatened by tornadoes. And every time we come back from a storm chase, I know I\u2019ve learned a ton more than I could learn in books and journal articles alone.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cBut mostly, we\u2019re out there for the fun of it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n


\nPhoto by Tracy McCormick<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lincoln resident turning big storms into career, hobby NARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 December 30, 2008 \u2013 As a child, Richard Yablonsky took an unusually serious interest in astronomy, meteorology, and natural disasters, consuming every bit of information he could about the subjects and even convincing his parents to take family vacations to places where he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64287,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}