Robin's Vision of a Supercell

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This is the heart of a supercell. It's like a big barber pole in the middle where the air is rising, but it's also twisting as it goes up. Supercells are these mega thunderstorms that spawn tornado. They rotate. So they're like kind of like these mini hurricanes. How do you take this big kind of lumbering rotation in the sky from these supercells? And how does that get concentrated down into this vortex that actually extends from the cloud all the way to the ground?

2023 has been a record-setting year for tornadoes, and these storms came with barely any warning. So to better understand tornadoes, scientists might need to confront more of these storms head-on.

This episode originally ran on July 12, 2021.

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