Perfect Disaster: Dallas Super Tornado?

The Discovery Channel, which brings you great science-content television, such as Mythbusters, which I religiously watch each week, is premiering a new mini-series Sunday night. It's called "Perfect Disaster" and it starts out with a "Super Tornado" hitting the city of Dallas, Texas.

We're advertising this series on AccuWeather.com and I have just finished watching the Super Tornado episode which they were kind enough to provide to their advertising partners. It was a nice mix of 3-D computer effects, a fictional short story, and scientific commentary from respected storm chasers such as Al Moller (author of "Storm Chase Ethics") and storm chaser legend Tim Marshall (who published the only Storm Chasing magazine). Here's the Discovery Channel spiel:

SUPER TORNADO
Location: Dallas, TX
Premiering Sunday, March 19, 9-10 PM

For a preview of the Super Tornado episode, visit this page and click on the middle tornado icon.

While having a little fun with computer effects, they deal with real-life storm forecasting problems. Tim Marshall talks about the limitations of weather radar, for example ("Imagine opening your eyes to see the storm but then closing them again for 6 minutes"). Certainly large tornadoes have occurred in the past, we've just been lucky that a strong F-5 hasn't plowed through a downtown area or sports arena yet. As they point out, the damage and loss of life would be incredible.

What's coming after Dallas' Super Tornado? There are two back-to-back episodes Sunday night, the second being about a massive Solar Storm that threatens to knock us back into the Stone Age. I've always thought that we'd gotten off easy in this department, so I look forward to seeing that one.

On March 26th, we'll see a Super Typhoon wipe out Hong Kong, then we'll turn London, England into New Orleans in "Mega Flood" on April 2nd. April 9th will have a Fire Storm destroying Sydney, Australia and finally on April 16th, an Ice Storm of gigantic proportions devastates Montreal, Canada. You can read more about each episode on the Discovery site.