The Press-Dispatch
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A-6 Local Wednesday, June 5, 2019 The Press-Dispatch MOOSE LODGE Dining Specials 5pm-8pm 115 Pike Ave., Petersburg OR ORDER FROM MENU FRIDAY 06-07-19 SATURDAY 06-08-19 PIZZA Open to Members and Qualified Guests Coffee or Tea with special. Available First and ird Wednesday of Each Month • 5pm - 8pm Buffet with Salad Bar, Only $10.95. Buffet with Salad Bar, Only $10.95. Family fishing day The Miley family took advantage of the beautiful weather on Monday to go fishing together. Jarrod Miley, Josh Miley, Jaden Miley, Lily Burns, Justin Crow and Jacob Miley fished from the shade of this tree near the banks of Ashley Lake in Hornady Park. Crow said they hadn't caught much, but the weather made up for it. A card show is being planned for Barb Himsel's 80th birthday on June 5. Send cards to 1833 W. Old U.S. Hwy. 50, Washington, IN 47501 Happy Birthday from your family! Happy 80th Birthday! Please share a memory! Thank You ank you so much for all the wonderful cards I received for my 70th birthday. So many thoughtful and nice people really made my birthday special. I really appreciated all the messages and love that I received. God bless you all, Love, Vicki Special thanks to Valli and Amie. German American Bank to host customer appreciation day Customers at all German American locations will be able to enjoy refreshments and enter to win prizes dur- ing a Customer Apprecia- tion Celebration on Friday, June 14. You're invited to cele- brate with a patriotic Red, White and You theme to recognize local communi- ty pride. Refreshments will be served at all offices dur- ing regular business hours, and customers can enter a drawing to win one of 30 German American Col- lapsible 30" wagons to be given away. German American is a community bank, with branches throughout the entire Southern Indiana ar- ea, as well as Owensboro, Bowling Green, Franklin and Lexington, Ky. Pike Co. SWCD to host Grassland and Pollinator Habitat Tour Pike County Soil and Wa- ter Conservation District will be hosting a Grass- land and Pollinator Habi- tat Tour, Monday, June 24 from 6 -8:30 p.m. at the Sug- ar Ridge Fish and Wildlife Conference Room, 2310 E. Hwy. 364, Winslow. Registration is free, but an RSVP is required. To register, call the Pike County SWCD office at 812-354-6120 ext. 3 or vis- it www.swcdhabitattour. eventbrite.com. The Press-Dispatch 812-354-8500 | www.pressdispatch.net *By enrolling in the Birthday Club, you agree to have your name, town and birth- day, or the person's name and town and birthday of whom you are enrolling, printed in e Press-Dispatch on the week in which the birthday occurs. Joining is easy! Visit pressdispatch.net/birthday or send your full name, address, city, state, zip code, phone number and birthdate to birthdayclub@pressdispatch.net.* Each week, a list of birthdays will be published in the paper! You could win a FREE PRIZE from area businesses and a three-month subscription to e Press-Dispatch. MUST RE-ENROLL EVERY YEAR! Join the One WINNER is drawn at the end of each month Researchers investigate shift in tornado activity By Kayla Zacharias Purdue News Service kzachar@purdue.edu Tornado season, which general- ly spans from March to June in the United States, is upon us. There have been more than 130 reports of torna- does across the country in the last five days, and earlier this year, 23 people were killed in a cluster of tornadoes near the border of Georgia and Ala- bama. Although tornado deaths have been on the decline thanks to advanc- es in scientific understanding of the storms and better warning systems, there's still a lot scientists don't know. 2011 was an especially deadly year for tornadoes. A fter nearly 1,700 storms killed 553 Americans in a sin- gle season, Congress decided to fund research efforts to help scientists bet- ter understand them. VORTEX South- east, a project to study how environ- mental characteristics of the south- eastern U.S. affect the formation, intensity, structure and path of torna- does in the region, is one such effort. Tornado Alley, which spans from Ne- braska to Texas, is widely recognized as being the epicenter of tornado activ- ity in the U.S. However, recent studies show it could be shifting. A 2016 study published in the Jour- nal of Applied Meteorology and Clima- tology shows that from 1954 to 1983, the center of tornado activity was be- tween southeastern Oklahoma and northeastern Texas. By 2013, it had shifted to northern Alabama. Deaths from tornadoes in the south- eastern U.S. are disproportionate- ly common compared to elsewhere in the country. Researchers believe this might be due to storms happen- ing before the peak of tornado season, when they typically move more quick- ly. Other explanations could include bad storm visibility, inadequate shel- ter and higher population density in southern states. During the spring of 2016 and 2017, Purdue researchers chased storms in northern Alabama as part of the VOR- TEX Southeast project. In collabora- tion with researchers from the Uni- versity of Massachusetts and the Uni- versity of Oklahoma, they used mobile radars to sample storms that passed within 60 kilometers (about 37 miles) from their site. They also used instru- mented probes with laser disdrome- ters to measure rain drop size distri- butions, wind, pressure, temperature and humidity. There are several questions about tornadoes in the Southeast the re- searchers want to answer. How do the environmental conditions that al- low tornadoes to form in the South- east compare to those in the tradition- al tornado alley? How are the storms that produce tornadoes affected by ter- rain, especially that of the Appalachian Mountains? How can forecasting and warnings be improved? "Most tornadoes, especially strong ones, are produced by a type of thun- derstorm known as a 'supercell,'" said Dan Dawson, an assistant professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at Purdue. "Some evidence suggests that tornadoes in the South- east, while also often occurring in su- percells, are produced more often than elsewhere from non-supercell storms. We hope to learn more about the na- ture of the formation processes for these tornadoes and how they differ from their supercell counterparts." A fter collecting data for two sea- sons, the Purdue team, comprised of Dawson, Ernest Agee, Michael Bald- win, Dan Chavas and Robin Tanama- chi, is stepping back to dig through what they've found. And they're start- ing to uncover some answers. One paper on the topic has been pub- lished, although it's based on historical data and not direct observations from the last two years. However, it does help answer some of the questions the researchers are trying to answer. The study looked at how small-scale terrain variability, such as hills, affect tornadoes in Arkansas. Arkansas is a good place to try to answer such a question because it's absent of moun- tains but home to a wide range of oth- er, smaller scale topographical fea- tures. Using empirical data from 1955 to 2015, the researchers found that tor- nadoes are impeded by hills. The find- ings were published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. "If hills are affecting tornadoes, are they interfering with them directly, on a physical level? Or are the storms that tornadoes form from, which occur on a slightly larger scale, not likely to form in areas with a lot of terrain variabili- ty? " asked Chavas, who led the study. "We found that this phenomenon is oc- curring on a really small scale, so the tornado is being directly affected by the terrain." The group has several papers in preparation and under review. Fund- ing for VORTEX-SE is provided by the NOA A National Severe Storms Labo- ratory.