FARGO — The storm system this past week caused a three-day blizzard in North Dakota and up to three feet of snow. It caused tornadoes and severe thunderstorms from southern Minnesota into the Southern Plains and across the Midwest. The storm dominated the weather of the central U.S. all week, causing stress, disappointment, hardship and inconvenience for millions of people.
A meteorologist thinks of storms as fluid dynamics; air, water, and ice with a lot of motion and energy. Storms are without entity, skin, spine, or purpose. It snowed three feet over three days in Minot because the wind currents produced enough snow from water vapor to do that. It is hard to write equations to describe the fluid dynamics of a storm because storms are large and complex with many subtle features, but that such equations can be written is wonderful and elegant.
