WILL WEATHER RESEARCH TWIST IN THE WIND?

If you like weather, science and watching “Twister” reruns every tornado season, then you must have loved Times Free Press reporter Ben Benton’s story Monday about scientists studying why Sand Mountain is a tornado magnet.

That’s right, a tornado magnet. Researchers told Benton that of 49 tornadoes touching down in the Sand Mountain area in the last 10 years, 32 of them formed on top of the mountain. And of those 32, 16 formed within three miles of the mountain’s northwestern edge.

On Wednesday the week before, researchers’ mobile radar had captured the formation of several thunderstorms, including one that intensified and produced a small tornado as the storm system moved northeast over the junction of the Tennessee-Georgia-Alabama state lines on the west side of Nickajack Lake.

That tornado was estimated to be an EF0 or EF1 with a path about 100 yards wide and more than two miles long, and it appeared to have been a storm influenced extensively by the presence of Sand Mountain and perhaps Lookout Mountain, too, according to researchers who now will be spending several weeks on the mountain to watch and catalog data from this spring season’s weather.

“With Sand Mountain, we have strong evidence that something physical is going on up there,” said Tony Lyza, a researcher and doctoral student from the Atmospheric Science Department of the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

Lyza is among as many as 40 researchers who are part of an ongoing study of what role topography plays in the formation of storms and tornadoes.

Thanks to more than $10 million in federal funding released in 2015 and 2016 to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, VORTEX-Southeast was able to launch the largest-ever study of tornadoes in our region. UAH’s Severe Weather Institute, Radar and Lightning Laboratories is the host for the study in Huntsville.

Given the geography of our tri-state region — the Cumberland Plateau and Appalachians in Tennessee, the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia and Sand Mountain’s extension of the Cumberland Plateau into North Alabama — this research has special interest for us. Scientists hypothesize that as winds approach a ridge like Sand Mountain, those winds accelerate as they squeeze up the slope then slow down suddenly when they drop off the other side of the mountain. You may recall that we’ve seen similar effects as tornadoes formed on Lookout Mountain and dropped on Lookout Valley, and formed on Signal Mountain then dropped onto Red Bank.

Kevin Knupp, lead scientist on the research team, said Sand Mountain offers an ideal study spot. He first noticed the effect of topography in 1989 when an EF4 tornado formed near Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.

But the kind of funding that makes this study possible is endangered under President Donald Trump’s science-deprived budget plan.

That plan, released in mid-March, would slash more than half of the funding for NOAA’s ocean and atmospheric research, eliminating scores of research projects, including the agency’s long-running, $73-million Sea Grant program, which supports 33 U.S. colleges and universities that conduct research, education and training about ocean and coastal topics. At the same time, the administration’s budget for NASA is shifting that agency’s focus “deep-space exploration rather than Earth-centric research.” In short, anything having to do with climate study is being axed.

Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, has been blunt when asked by national reporters about the cuts to climate research in Trump’s plan: “We’re not spending money on that any more,” he said. “We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”

To call this short-sighted is obvious. Even 7th-graders understand that ocean temperatures, currents and tides contribute to how the wind blows and how storms form. But, alas, Trump says he doesn’t like to read, and apparently his science and budget advisers don’t either.

Scientists do, and increasingly they are sounding alarms that climate change already is spawning more extreme weather. Even here. And these shifts — however slight now — should be researched.

On April 27, 2011, a monster EF5 tornado killed 35 Sand Mountain residents as it plowed through DeKalb County. It was one of 62 tornadoes that struck Alabama that day (363 tornadoes across the South during a four-day outbreak). When it was over, 81 people in the Chattanooga region lost their lives to the deadly storms. Across the South the death toll was 348 and another 2,775 were injured, according to weather.com. Damages totaled $10.8 billion.

This kind of research, which can only be done in real time and in real storms, doesn’t come cheap, yet understanding what role topography plays can guide scientists to better forecasts — more advanced warning, reduced false alarms and “site-specific” warnings.

Knupp says warning lead time for tornadoes is currently about 15 minutes. Forecasters would like to be able to stretch that to an hour.

In our mountains, those extra minutes could make all the difference.

Trump and his advisers don’t have to believe in climate change (though we wish they would). But they should believe in saving lives.