Intensity
A TVS can be measured by gate to gate wind shear, which is the change of wind speed and direction across the two gates of inbound and outbound velocities. Gates are the individual pixels on the radar display. For example, if the inbound velocity is −48 knots (−89 km/h) knots and the outbound is 39 knots (72 km/h), then there is 87 knots (161 km/h) of gate to gate shear. The impressiveness of a TVS not only has to do with the strength of the gate to gate shear, but it also incorporates the size and depth of the TVS, and the strength of any surrounding mesocyclone, among other things.
Read more about this topic: Tornado Vortex Signature
Famous quotes containing the word intensity:
“Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.”
—Octave Mirbeau (1850–1917)
“The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“Consider the difference between looking and staring. A look is voluntary; it is also mobile, rising and falling in intensity as its foci of interest are taken up and then exhausted. A stare has, essentially, the character of a compulsion; it is steady, unmodulated, “fixed.””
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)