Extreme Weather

Forty Years of the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO)

Robert K. Doe

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781118949955
• eBook ISBN: 9781118951095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Meteorology & Climatology

This book is about weather extremes in the United Kingdom. It presents fascinating and detailed insights into tornadoes (supercell and non-supercell tornadoes, historical and contemporary case studies, frequency and spatial distributions, and unique data on extreme events); thunderstorms (epic event analysis and observing); hailstorms (intensity, distributions and frequency of high magnitude events); lightning (lightning as a hazard, impacts and injuries); ball lightning (definitions, impacts and case studies); flooding (historical and contemporary analysis, extreme rainfall and flash flooding); snowfalls (heavy snowfall days and events). It also looks at researching weather extremes, provides guidance on performing post-storm site investigations and details what is involved in severe weather forecasting. It is written by members, directors and past and present Heads of the research group the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO). With fifteen chapters thematically arranged, and data appendix including a new tornado map of the U.K., this book presents a wealth of information on meteorological extremes.
 
This volume is aimed primarily at researchers in the field of meteorology and climatology, but will also be of interest to advanced undergraduate students taking relevant courses in this area.

1
Researching Extreme Weather in the United Kingdom and Ireland: The History of the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation, 1974–2014

G. Terence Meaden

Kellogg College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

1.1 Introduction: The Early Years

TORRO was launched in Britain in 1974 as the Tornado Research Organisation. The seeds had been sown a long time earlier, in 1950, when I became a 15-year-old amateur meteorologist at grammar school in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. Before then, I had decided to become a scientist or archaeologist for which a university education would be needed, and so I had embarked on preparing the necessary background. Because physics is the quintessential science, I made it my forte, while being attracted nonetheless to the problem-solving challenges of archaeology for its discoveries of the prehistoric human past. By 1948 the schoolteachers knew that Oxford University was my ambition. In April 1950, Trowbridge Boys High School purchased a Stevenson Screen, thermometers, a rain gauge and a subscription to Weather Magazine. New vistas appealed. By January 1951, I had bought a good rain gauge and built my first thermometer screen for a home station. I also subscribed to Weather and have done so ever since. The Meteorological Office’s British Rainfall accepted my rainfall data from 1951 to 1966, and, because I enjoyed thunderstorms and studying tornadoes, I joined Morris Bower’s Thunderstorm Census Organisation.

For some years, I ran two weather stations. In February 1951, the editor of the county newspaper Wiltshire Times announced that its weather correspondent was leaving the county and asked for a replacement. I immediately supplied a detailed monthly weather report and became the newspaper’s weather correspondent for the 3 years until I went to Oxford. This initiative at writing for the press and reporting the weather was appreciated by the schoolteachers and Oxford dons, and undoubtedly helped me, age 17, at the interviews for the entrance examination in January 1953.

At Oxford I read physics where I got to know meteorologist Professor Alan Brewer (1915–2007) who proposed me as a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society (FRMetS) in December 1957. Doctoral research followed (1957–1961) (Figure 1.1) and then a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. In 1963 I left to pursue low temperature physics research at the University of Grenoble in France and afterwards got a tenured position as a Professor of Physics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. I even took my Stevenson screen and Snowdon rain gauge to Canada, encouraged by the prospect of measuring very low winter temperatures, savage wind chills and high cyclonic rainfalls from which the Maritime Provinces suffered.¹

Figure 1.1 Terence Meaden in 1961 (left) and in 2013 (right).

Back in Oxford, in 1972 and 1973, I specialised in studying the incidence of tornadoes in Britain. I was impressed by the number of well-documented historical cases scattered through volumes in the Radcliffe Science Library. Britton (1937) in his chronology of British weather to the year 1450 aided research for the medieval centuries, and Ralph Edwin Lacy’s paper in Weather 1968 appealed for its listing of tornadoes from 1963 to 1966. Among the long runs of magazines, George Symons’ Meteorological Magazine included hundreds of storm cases and many tornado events in the early issues from 1865 to 1914.

Seeing that tornado and thunderstorm research was not being done by the Meteorological Office, here was a worthy area of study with obvious prospects of long-lasting usefulness. At the time I thought that a series of severe-storm books might develop, but instead a weather magazine (The Journal of Meteorology) was launched.

It felt necessary to compile data on severe-storm and tornado events as they were being reported countrywide in order to inspect fresh damage with minimum delay, so I subscribed to a press-clipping service using search words like tornado, whirlwind, waterspout, freak wind and hurricane wind. The database soon held hundreds of tornado cases. As best as possible, details of track length, direction, path width and damage were summarised. Regarding the latter, an expanded version of the Beaufort scale at first proved helpful for estimating wind speeds of the mostly weak tornadoes, but something more specific and re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• About the Companion Website
• 1 Researching Extreme Weather in the United Kingdom and Ireland: The History of the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation, 1974–2014
• Part I: Tornadoes
• Part II: Thunderstorms and Lightning
• Part III: Extremes
• Appendix B: Selected Pictures from Conferences and Meetings
• Appendix C: Tornadoes in the United Kingdom and Ireland 1054–2013
• Selected Name Index
• Subject Index
• End User License Agreement