Word: cat
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Clear air turbulence is exactly what it sounds like: an airplane speeding through a cloudless part of the sky can be ripped apart by an invisible tempest. CAT is most often met just above or just below the 30,000-35,000-ft. jet stream - and modern aircraft like best the levels near the great, racing jet stream. It has been agreed that CAT is caused by wind shear -the "friction" between adjacent air masses moving at different speeds. Last week Joseph J. George, chief meteorologist for Eastern Airlines, told how this knowledge might be put to work to predict...
After studying the meteorological records of bad CAT occurrences, George and his research team concluded that not one, but two different sorts of wind shear must be present to cause dangerous clear air turbulence. One is horizontal shear, caused by friction between air masses moving side by side at different speeds. The other is vertical shear, caused by the friction between two air masses, the one above the other, moving at different speeds...
...forecast severe CAT, George studies weather data in search of above-and-below air layers that are being dragged violently past each other by the jet stream. He draws on a map the area where this vertical shearing is sufficiently intense. Then he scans the data a second time to see if any air masses on the same level are moving rapidly past each other. If this is the case, he marks another area on his map (see diagram). If the areas overlap, the overlap has the two necessary kinds of violent shear. It is therefore apt to be full...
George is confident that his method can spot severe CAT in time to warn pilots not to fly through it. The only trouble is that present facilities cannot furnish enough weather data to track down CAT wherever it may exist...
...puppet heavy (the children in the audience always booed and hissed); Dilly-Dally, the sad-sack tot; Flubadub, the curious crossbreed with a duck's head, spaniel's ears, giraffe's neck, dachshund's body, seal's flippers, pig's tail and the cat's whiskers...