Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 7 · column 3 of 9 · from the scan, no model involved
Thunderstorm Power
Greater than A-Bomb
It often rains “upside down” in the sudden fury of a summer thunderstorm. Strong updrafts may roar up at 60 miles an hour and carry raindrops high into the air before the water droplets grow heavy and plummet to earth. ! So violent are the updrafts and downdrafts within the storm (system that they can toss an airplane hundreds of feet in seconds, flip it over, or even rip off its wings.
An average summer storm produces 50 times the energy of the first atomic bomb, the National Geographic Society says.
Triggers Hailstones
The storm may release a hundred thousand tons of rain and hailstones as big as grapefruit. The pelting hail flattens crops, splinters buildings, smashes glass, and kills animals, birds, livestock, and sometimes men. A hailstorm that stuck Whichita, Kansas, in 1951 caused property damage in excess of $14 million.
Paradoxically, violent storms [also produce valuable fertilizer. Lightning frees nitrogen from the iair, and rain washes it into the Isoil at the rate of a hundred million tons a year.
About 1,800 thunderstorms rage around the world at any given moment. The west coast has the fewest thunderstorms of any area in the United States--an average of less than five a year. The greatest number-some 90-strike a strip in Florida extending northeastward from Tampa Bay to Daytona Beach.
For all its power, a thunderstorm begins as a column of gently rising air-warm, moist, and walled by a chimney of cooler air. It is topped by a cottony cumulus cloud.
Such a thunderstorm “cell” of rising warmth, if conditions are just right, gains power as it lifts. Air expands and cools; it begins wringing out its load of water vapor. Droplets form and grow
/■■Vt A.'l / \t /At h\% Mj
92.8%