The last month has been a whirlwind.  Time has done that weird thing where it seems both an age ago and yesterday since I moved house.  I still have boxes everywhere and don’t seem to have a free moment to unpack many of them, and I’m going to bed mentally exhausted as I work through a mountain of a ToDo list.
I have found time to get out though.  I’m sword training twice a week at the moment and that’s going well and last weekend I went to the Torro Autumn conference to hear about the latest in tornadoes and their research.
As regular readers of this blog know , I’m a big fan of tornadoes; not the destruction they wrought but the mere act of nature.  I’ve even chased in the US (and been in the outer edges of a mile wide EF2).
But what surprises me (constantly) is how little we know about these acts of nature and how little research has been done.  What’s all the more surprising is the research that has been done has often been done not by academics but by knowledgable amateurs with an interest.
As much as I am like Benny from The LEGO Movie, “shouting “Tornado, tornado, tornado” instead of “spaceship, spaceship, spaceship” I have a real and genuine interest in the science of tornadoes.  Therefore travelling to the conference last weekend and hearing all about research on things like topography and tornado formation was genuinely riveting.
I enjoyed my day and am determined that the idea for a research project of my own should be moved forward.  I need to find ways to source some historic weather data but it’s going to be interesting to see what comes out of it.
The last time I went to a Torro conference I was a few weeks away from going on my first chase.  Now I’ve been out to the US and experienced tornadoes I’m even hungrier for information.  We’re a long way from being able to predict tornadoes but there’s an army of academics and amateurs studying these things and trying to learn their lessons.