Supersize supercell supersimulation

摘要

SUPERCELL THUNDERSTORMS ARE GIANT TEMPESTS with powerful rotating updrafts at their cores-and one out of every four or five spawn tornadoes. Most of these twisters are little, but some can grow fierce. To predict the rare killers-and thus give more-targeted warnings-meteorologists need to better understand how tornadoes form. But simulating a supercell thunderstorm and the tornado it produces involves hundreds of terabytes of data-an amount so vast that Leigh Orf, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had to use a supercomputer to make it happen.