Dr. Jana Houser with University of Oklahoma’s Rapid-scan, X-band, polarimetric mobile radar (RaXPol).
Earth, Space and Science News interviewed Dr. Jana Houser, Assistant Professor of Geography at Ohio University, for a story headlined “Before Canadian Scientists Can Study Tornadoes, They Have to Find Them.”
Jana Houser, an assistant professor of meteorology at Ohio University, studies how tornadoes form and how topography affects them. She’s not involved in the Northern Tornadoes Project but speculates that a fuller data set on tornado strikes would help climatologists investigate long-term tornado trends.
“If you don’t have the reporting numbers, then you don’t have confidence in the [answer to the] question of where tornadoes form. There might be geographic, subtle changes, or certain areas are seeing tornadoes earlier in the year.”
Houser adds that the meteorology community has “a pretty good understanding of the environments that are needed to produce tornadoes” but that there are some “subtleties….As a community, we are investigating why one supercell produces a tornado while the next one over, which is what appears to be a similar environment with a similar structure, doesn’t end up producing tornadoes. That’s the largest gap in our knowledge.”
Read more in Earth, Space and Science News.
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