Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary Journey
8.32pm – 9.32pm
ABC1

From stunning space imagery to in-your-face storm chasing, this series showcases the incredible power of our seasons and weather, and what drives them to both incredible creation and devastating destruction.

Tornado at sea
http://i.imgur.com/q103oGJ.jpg

Twill be nice if Steve offers his assessment.

Kate has said …hot air rises

She has also said that the atmosphere is a fluid

gases are treated as fluid. or so i believe. less dense air is pushed up by denser air. i think that is a better way of putting it.

hmmmm dr paul will be hating this. they are wasting helium again.

plus the SR-71 went higher than there balloon which the reckon would get to altitudes only astronauts get too. hmmmmm.

Taped, and just finished enjoyably watching. An excellent hour’s viewing, all told. Seemingly effortless blending of superb photography and well-explained basic orbital and rotational geophysics. Very agreeably presented by two enthusiastic women, which makes a nice change from the usual blokedom.

I enjoyed it.

Gases are fluids:

“In physics, a fluid is a substance that continually deforms (flows) under an applied shear stress. Fluids are a super set of the phases of matter and include liquids, gases, plasmas and, to some extent, plastic solids.”

But a lot of the physics was dodgy, especially the bit about the Coriolis effect. Having gone to the trouble of setting up a video camera on a roundabout it would have been easy to show that the ball only appears to follow a curved line when thrown through the air.

But a lot of the physics was dodgy,

that was my take. like in the car….1000+mph relative to what?.