Video: 3D tornado lets you step into the eye of a storm
When a massive tornado hit Moore, Oklahoma, in May 2013, it would have been sensible to stay clear. But now a virtual recreation of the twister is allowing researchers to step right into it.
Using radar data collected as the event unfolded, Bill Carstensen from Virginia Tech and colleagues built a 3D model of the developing storm, stacked on top of a digital version of the Oklahoma landscape. The tornado is displayed in a unique, four-story-high virtual theatre at the university where it can be viewed with an Oculus Rift headset.
The set-up allows a person to walk into the tornado as though they were a towering giant, viewing it from the perspective of someone 2.1 metres tall. Layers of rain can be peeled away to peer into the eye of the storm and probe its structure. Red areas in the atmosphere represent where there is heavy rain, whereas yellow shows where it is lighter.
The system should help researchers to better understand how storms behave. Ultimately, the team hopes to update radar data in real time so emergency managers can study a storm as it’s developing, with just a few minutes’ delay.
The 2013 twister recreated in this video, which killed 24 people, might not have broken any records, but it scored highly on most metrics, such as size, strength and duration.
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