NASA Made a Mindblowing 3D GIF of the Texas Tornadoes

The Texas tornadoes were insanely powerful, tossing flatbed trucks around like toys and raining softball-sized hail. NASA turned the data from its TRMM weather satellite into a 3D model that shows the absurd scope and intensity of the storms.


There's a (30MB) GIF download available, but we included a video above so we don't choke your browser to death. [Eurekalert]



..and what the hell are we looking at? Is this a plot of wind speeds? A histogram plotting the number of times "holy shit" is yelled per minute by location?