Weekly Reader Features PSC Tornado

PITTSBURGH, May 28, 2008 – The online edition of the classic children’s publication Weekly Reader recently featured a tornado animation produced at PSC. See the animated presentation here.

PSC visualization specialist Greg Foss created the animation from a simulation by University of Oklahoma scientist Ming Xue. Xue, director of the Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms at Norman, used PSC supercomputing to simulate a 1977 supercell storm system and the high-intensity tornado it spawned. The results – which capture the tornado’s vortex structure, with wind speed of 260 miles per hour – represent the highest resolution simulation ever done of an entire thunderstorm and its tornado.

See PSC’s article about this work, “Retwistered Twister.”