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Great Walls of America 'could stop tornadoes'


Still Waters

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Building three "Great Walls" across Tornado Alley in the US could eliminate the disasters, a physicist says.

The barriers - 300m (980ft) high and up to 100 miles long - would act like hill ranges, softening winds before twisters can form.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-26492720

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the great wall of china did not achieve its purpose, I do not think this idea will either

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Like Constantinople's Great Walls stopped the Ottomans.

We had a tornado in Colorado when I lived there and it was a mountainous region. His idea may work most of the time, but it won't work all the time.

Doug

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Maybe "wall" of wind farms would be as much helpful as the brick wall... After all, it works in the case of hurricanes:

It finds that large turbine arrays (300+ GW installed capacity) may diminish peak near-surface hurricane wind speeds by 25–41 m s−1 (56–92 mph) and storm surge by 6–79%.
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This physicist (not a meteorologist) is a wackadoodle. From this same article below a real meteorologist responds. I think it would need to be even higher like 20,000ft high. The storms and air flows that cause tornadoes are very high in the atmosphere, not at ground level.

"From what I can gather his concept of how tornadoes form is fundamentally flawed. Meteorologists cringe when they hear about 'clashing hot and cold air'. It's a lot more complicated than that."

Though much of the blame does lie with warm air rushing north from the Gulf of Mexico, stopping it would be nigh on impossible, Prof Wurman says.

"Perhaps if he built his barrier on the scale of the Alps - 2,000-3,000m (9,800ft) high, it would disrupt it," he says.

Edited by ninjadude
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That would probably have something to do with the total and complete unpredictability of tornados..... you go ahead and build a generator and it will function once in fifty years when a tornado of sufficient size comes close enough.... then after all that waiting the whole show is over in a few seconds as the tornado moves on to the next town..

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All this would do is add shrapnel to the tornados.

The government built a radar station in salt lake, to see tornados coming. But, they thought a tornado couldn't form below a certain night. They were wrong.

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When was the last time you heard of a tornado in China?

Just sayin...

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Chinese tornado's are called Typhoons, which occur mainly in the South China Sea, and they suppress broadcasting any damage caused unlike the U.S.A.

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A "typhoon" is NOT a "tornado" in the classical sense(though cyclonic activity is prevalent in all). A tornado is very small in comparison, for one, perhaps a half a mile or more, and has no "eye-wall"

A "typhoon" is exactly the same as a "hurricane"(neither of which are "tornadoes"), and stretches many, many hundreds of miles. Just that the naming is different for these storms given their regional location and cultural language describing these massive storms.

See here for more info: http://oceanservice....ts/cyclone.html

Edited by pallidin
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A typhoon is the asian equivalent of a hurricane, not a tornado.

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Even if this crazy wall project was to work, it would probably create problems elsewhere as a result.

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I live in a hilly zone. No tornadoes hit where I live. There is a no tornado zone around WV due to its mountains, but the no twister zone does have twisters nearby that form only over the flat valleys between ridges. In one case a tornado formed and followed a valley. In another case it formed as the storm dropped off a ridge and then the tornado dissipated as the next ridge line was reached.

Could you imagine the arguments with people about having a 300m high wall in their backyard? What if it causes snow to drift tens of feet deep causing houses to be buried? Sounds to me like more than tornadoes has to be considered.

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I live in a hilly zone. No tornadoes hit where I live. There is a no tornado zone around WV due to its mountains, but the no twister zone does have twisters nearby that form only over the flat valleys between ridges. In one case a tornado formed and followed a valley. In another case it formed as the storm dropped off a ridge and then the tornado dissipated as the next ridge line was reached.

Could you imagine the arguments with people about having a 300m high wall in their backyard? What if it causes snow to drift tens of feet deep causing houses to be buried? Sounds to me like more than tornadoes has to be considered.

Don't get too complacent...that is what we thought until two years ago. I live near the foot of a mountain where a tornado came across from the other side of the mountain, slid down our side and wiped out ten houses in the neighborhood. Until then absolutely no one in the area ever gave a tornado warning a second thought. We always assumed it was for the outlying farmland.

I've lived here, or near, for around 30 years and it's almost unprecedented even from years before.

Edited by Michelle
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Apologies for mixing up Tornado's with Typhoons, I do know the difference, just got the wording incorrect.

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If it were possible to build a wall high enough to stop tornadoes from forming, it would have to stop the flow of warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico... Everything north of the wall would be a barren wasteland... The rains would stop and the Missouri river would dry up, causing the Mississippi river to be drastically reduced in volume which would basically destroy some of the richest farm land in the world...

This does not have "Bad Idea" written on it.. This has "Amazingly Bad Idea" written all over it...

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A 300ft high wall would be quite an ugly thing to have on the landscape and theres no guarantee it would work. A powerful tornado may pull the wall appart making the situation far worse.

Maybe people should just stop living in the path of tornados in wooden houses, shacks and caravans. If you want something to survive a tornado, you build down not up...

Edited by Finity
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A "typhoon" is NOT a "tornado" in the classical sense(though cyclonic activity is prevalent in all). A tornado is very small in comparison, for one, perhaps a half a mile or more, and has no "eye-wall"

A "typhoon" is exactly the same as a "hurricane"(neither of which are "tornadoes"), and stretches many, many hundreds of miles. Just that the naming is different for these storms given their regional location and cultural language describing these massive storms.

See here for more info: http://oceanservice....ts/cyclone.html

You know, I keep hearing that, but in practice I have been through three hurricanes and about 4 typhoons, and I cannot consider a typhoon to be anywhere near a hurricane in terms of destructive power. Heck, I mistook my first typhoon for a particularly bad rainstorm.

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Tell that to the two Korean fleets that tried to invade japan. Both went down due to the divine wind, Kamikaze.

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Sounds like a poor excuse to build more walls in America...

Edited by Junior Chubb
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Well, they would have to make a way for sharks to be filtered from the tornadoes, prior to wall impact.

Just sayin!

Maximus

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I think the theory is to disrupt the flow, not to cause it to come to a dead stop. If a tornado is forming or moving and runs into a structure it may disrupt the circular wind flow which may cause it to begin breaking up. I don't think the wall would have to be very high but there would have to be a lot of them. Just a thought.

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