Epic fail: Giant walls wouldn't stop tornadoes

Talk about an epic fail.

Building gigantic,1,000-foot tall-walls across the central USA wouldn't stop tornadoes and might actually cause other problems, says a recent study in the Electronic Journal of Severe Storms Meteorology.

The study by meteorologist Brice Coffer of North Carolina State University was a follow-up to a wild theory proposed this year by physicist Rongjia Tao of Temple University.

Tao wrote in the International Journal of Modern Physics B, "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."

"Tornado Alley" is located in the Plains states from the Dakotas to Texas and is a hot spot for severe storms and tornadoes.

Though Tao's study was met with widespread scorn and derision throughout the meteorological community, Coffer, a graduate student, wanted to test the theory.

"I did computer simulations using the Weather Research and Forecasting model (the same model the National Weather Service uses to make high-resolution storm forecasts) with and without the proposed walls," Coffer said.

In the simulations — which used an actual tornado outbreak from May 2013 as a test — he found the proposed walls would have little impact on the atmosphere. "The warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico simply flows up and over the minor obstacle," he said.

Storms in the central USA can rise up to a mind-boggling 60,000 feet high — that's 11 miles. So a "little" 1,000-foot wall wouldn't help. Coffer tried simulations with 8,000-foot walls. Still no dice.

"When the height of the walls is increased, so that air is blocked by the walls, air flows around the walls instead. This causes the tornadic storms to be shifted east, instead of eliminating them," he said.

There would be other problems, Coffer found, namely that moisture flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico would be blocked, turning most of the central USA into a desert.

Additionally, strong circulations are produced at the edges of the walls, which could cause more landspout tornadoes, which form differently than normal tornadoes.

"(Tao) also has some misconceptions on how thunderstorms form in the first place," Coffer said. "The central United States is known for tornadoes because warm, moist air at the surface from the Gulf of Mexico is brought northward, while the winds aloft bring in cool, dry from the Rockies. It is this vertical temperature difference that causes storms, not a 'clash' at the surface."

Back to the drawing board.