Cogito: A Proposal for the Study of Tornados

Cogito

I was watching a documentary on The Death And Destruction channel one night about these storm chasers. I'd seen shows on these guys before. They were the inspiration for the movie "Twister". Now, for those of you not familiar with "Twister", Bill Paxton tearasses around in his big ol' pickup, attempting to get this water-heater thing in front of a tornado. Their goal is to learn about how tornadoes work by sticking the waterheater inside a tornado. This would seem fairly simple, but since they don't know how the tornado works, they spend most of their time just missing the tornado, which always seems to find them just fine. In the end, they get the device in the tornado and they day is saved.

The real storm watchers failed for two reasons:

Real tornadoes do not crop up at a rate of over five an hour, and:
They didn't have Bill Paxton.

Now, since the NOAA and universities do not have Bill Paxton type money, they must come up with another solution. Obviously, the problem is one of getting the sensor into the tornado. Nobody in their right mind wants to get anywhere close to the damned thing, so we need some sort of remote device. Therefore, I present:

PROPOSAL #1

Obviously, if you are going to leave a waterheater full of stuff in the path of a tornado, you'll want to put it somewhere statistically most likely to lie in the tornado's path. And, as anyone can tell you, tornados are always most attracted by trailer parks. Seems fairly self-explanatory.

PROPOSAL #2

While my first proposal works better than the original storm chaser idea, it is not nearly so fun as my true proposal. Any university or agency may freely use this proposal, provided that I get to come along as an advisor, of course.

Now, what is faster and has less restrictive movement than pickup trucks? Well, plenty of things. But, in terms of stuff that man can control, we're pretty much restricted to airborne stuff. And, for this application, one choice stands out as clearly superior in terms of speed, safety, and control. Plus, it definitely scores serious "cool" points. The solution is guided missiles.

Think about it for a moment: guided missiles (GMs) are easy to transport, look real cool, and are deigned to carry a smallish payload. Plus, our rapidly shrinking military now has more missiles than people to shoot them. They would probably be more than happy to sell (at below cost) or outright give away a couple dozen GMs.

Having the GMs isn't enough; we'd also need a delivery platform: one not affected by weather. Again, our military could help out by giving us a few HUMVEEs. The TOW missile package, for example, has already been mounted to the Hummer, and would be an obvious GM-platform combination.

Some may question the military's willingness to co-sponsor such an effort. Nonsense! Tornados effect them just as much. Those quonset huts look suspiciously like mobile homes to me. To God, far above, the difference must be negligible.

Some may say that the missile is far too small and far too fast to be able to collect any meaningful data. To these naysayers I say: who cares? The original group failed 100%. If we can even get one in, we would be one up on them. Plus, to be honest, I don't really give a rat's ass. I'm just interested in tearin' across the midwest in Hummers, shooting missiles at tornados.

[THINK SOME MORE]