Brief Overview of Three Tornadic Quasi-Linear Convective System (QLCS) events over the Mid-Mississippi Valley Region During the Spring 2002 Convective

Brief Overview of Three Tornadic Quasi-Linear Convective System (QLCS) events over the Mid-Mississippi Valley Region During the Spring 2002 Convective Season

Ron Przybylinski
NOAA/Weather Forecast Office

November 10, 2004

ABSTRACT

The Spring 2002 convective season was extremely active across the Mid-Mississippi Valley Region with three tornadic supercell events and five tornadic bowing convective line events. Nearly all of the tornadic cases evolved during the period from mid April through mid-May 2002. Twenty tornadoes were documented in the WFO St. Louis County Warning Area (CWA) during this period. Much of the tornadic damage was rated F1. In some areas, residents across southwest and south-central Illinois experienced severe storm activity twice within a one week period. Ground-based damage assessments were conducted for all of the tornadic events. This presentation will briefly compare the environmental and storm evolution of three of the five QLCS tornadic events. The first tornadic event in this presentation occurred during the very early morning of May 7, 2002 just north of the St. Louis Metro area. Two weak non-supercell tornadoes occurred near the intersection of a slow south-moving surface boundary and an eastward moving small bowing segment within a larger convective line. The first tornado occurred over extreme southeast Lincoln County Missouri while the second tornado occurred over far southern Calhoun County Illinois. A larger swath of damaging downburst winds was uncovered over east and southeast of the second tornado touchdown and reached northern St. Charles County Missouri. The mesovortex formed, then rapidly intensified and deepened near the intersection of the bowing segment and surface boundary. Characteristics of the mesovortex will be highlighted. A second bow echo tornadic event occurred during the early evening of 12 May 2002 over southeast Missouri. An isolated strong storm formed 30 km downshear of a developing bowing segment and laid a nearly east-west surface boundary. Small convective towers formed just upshear of the larger isolated cell and were anchored to the surface boundary. A mesovortex formed just north of the apex of a bowing segment and eventually interacted with the slow northward moving surface boundary. A weak tornado (F1) occurred approximately five minutes after the interaction of the surface boundary, bowing segment and mesovortex. The tornado caused damage from 5 km west of Desloge through the western part of the town. The third bow echo tornadic event occurred during the early morning of 9 May 2002 near Centralia Illinois in south-central Illinois about 145 km east of the KLSX WSR-88D Doppler radar. A non-supercell tornado caused extensive damage along a 1.5 km path. Two fatalities occurred in a mobile home park near the north side of Centralia. A small bow echo embedded within the larger convective line caused scattered wind damage across Clinton and Fayette counties northwest of Centralia. Timely severe thunderstorm warnings were issued for this reflectivity segment. However, the non-supercell tornado occurred along the leading edge of a broad bowing segment south of the smaller bow. Low-level storm-relative velocity data showed only the presence of a very weak mesovortex along the leading edge of the broad bowing segment as the tornado occurred. This case will be compared to the two preceding non-supercell tornadic events.

[FW:ACM Tech News] "Data-Mining" on Shakespeare

Hi,

 

Not long ago, I was just thinking about this possibility when I was in my under program.  At that time, I majored in psychology, and had particular interest in cognitive science.  I thought literature people would refuse to do this forever, but some other people really did this.

Try to imagine that, someday, computer can do creative writing by itself, and what is the use of mankind?

 

T.S.Yo

 

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"Data-Mining"
California Computer News (10/27/04)

A multi-university collaboration between English literature and computer science researchers seeks to apply data mining technology to digital library collections. The effort spearheaded by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) has won almost $600,000 in funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a data-mining scheme that can find interesting new patterns in volumes on British and American literature. GSLIS dean John Unsworth says statistical analysis has often been used in literary study, but this is one of the earliest applications of data mining. The project builds on existing data-mining tools already developed by the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and will be applied to terabytes of humanities resources made available online. Unsworth says complex analysis of broad sets of works would yield interesting new discoveries and lead to better targeted literary research. The project team already tested their technology on the full set of Shakespeare plays, finding that "Othello" shared many characteristics with comedies, pointing a way to interesting academic study. Unsworth says the technology will prove even more useful when applied to larger sets of work. Collaborators on the Web-based Text Mining and Visualization for Humanities Digital Libraries project include English literature academics from the University of Georgia and the University of Maryland, plus computer science colleagues from the University of Virginia and other institutions.
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