There was much coverage recently about the claim of physicist Rongjia Tao (left) of Temple University that tornados could be curtailed dramatically in the Midwest by the construction of 1,000-foot walls across the middle of the country. Meteorologist Brice Coffer of North Carolina State University says that his research blows away that theory.

Coffer (right) published his results in the Electronic Journal of Severe Storm Meteorology. He looked at Tao’s claim that “If we build three east-west great walls in the American Midwest, one in North Dakota, one along the border between Kansas and Oklahoma to the east, and the third one in south Texas and Louisiana, we will diminish the tornado threats in the Tornado Alley forever.” Coffer decided to plug in the numbers in computer simulations and found the Great Wall would have little impact on the atmosphere as suggested since “[t]he warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico simply flows up and over the minor obstacle.” In fact, even if the air is pushed around the walls, it merely causes the “tornadic storms to be shifted east, instead of eliminating them.”

Then there is the little problem that the wall, in Coffer’s view, could block moisture flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico and turn most of the central USA into a desert.

Now that this theory has been analyzed I thought that these two academics can join forces in addressing this twister and the danger of transportation to different realms:

Source: USA Today