Walls proposed to combat tornadoes

USAToday.com is reporting an apparently credible scientist claims that tornado issues here in the "Ally" can be solved by building several gigantic walls. Forget China, here comes the Great Wall of Gotebo, OK.

"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," said physicist Rongjia Tao of Temple University.

The walls would need to be about 1,000 feet high and 150 feet wide, he said. Tao is presenting his research next week at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver according to USAToday.com

Now that a great mind of science has noticed violent clashes between northbound warm air and southbound cold air causes violent weather we can all sleep easier.

What a relief.

Click here for the full story from USAToday which includes critics of the plan.

"It wouldn't work," tornado researcher Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., said in an e-mail.

Brooks said that China has deadly tornadoes despite the east-west mountain ranges there. In addition, he said, tornadoes still occur in parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri despite the presence there of smaller east-west mountain ranges similar in size to Tao's proposed walls.

"This is essentially a case of a physicist, who may be very good in his sub-discipline, talking about a subject about which he is abysmally ignorant," Brooks told USAToday.com.

Another expert, meteorologist Mike Smith of AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions, also called the theory "nonsense."

Smith said, "if supercell thunderstorms with F-5 tornadoes could laugh, they would have a hearty chuckle as they 'attacked' the wall. If tornadoes can go up and down mountains (and they can!), they would go over/through the wall."

Tulsa Today founder David Arnett has long suggested that, "God made Oklahoma to prove Mother Nature has both a temper and a sense of humor in all four seasons." Humor aside, weather in Oklahoma is a participatory sport.  We pay attention, go outside for the best report and not once suggest that it is all George W. Bush's fault.